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Ask HN: Heroku or Not?

by johnfelix on 9/5/10, 4:48 PM with 55 comments

• by moe on 9/5/10, 6:42 PM

  Wow, lots of heroku praise here. Let's put that a bit into perspective.

  Heroku is indeed great for starting out when you can get away with the free plan or need only a small number of dynos and ideally none of their addons. Heroku can be a beautiful launchpad during the bootstrap phase.

  Once your heroku bill approaches about ~$500/month you should start looking elsewhere, though. Their pricing for larger deployments becomes outright hilarious above roughly that threshold.

  And with hilarious I mean really hilarious, as in the $3500 price point for a 50G memcached instance. For that money you can also buy a physical server with 64G RAM every month, fresh from the factory...

• by angilly on 9/5/10, 6:00 PM

  Trust me, Heroku is not costly compared to setting up a server:

  $ git push master heroku

  is a lot cheaper then:

  Setup a machine. Then setup mysql, nginx, REE 1.8.6, or did you go with MRI 1.9.1? You're not gonna launch on Rails3 right? Because then you can't do 1.9.1, you have to go to 1.9.2. And you know how to setup nginx to pipe requests through to a Rails app. Are you going with Passenger or Unicorn? Oh make sure to bring up another machine to act as a MySQL slave. You know how to do that right? And you're dumping your DB to disk and backing up to S3 regularly right. Just write a simple script/cron job to handle that. And when you setup your machines you made sure to setup 2 so that if one goes down, the other will still be around, and you setup a load balancer that will realize when one of those machines goes down right?

  etc.... :)

• by TylerJewell on 9/5/10, 6:49 PM

  I am a Heroku fan. Some things for you to consider: 1) The real value of Heroku is time savings. Their deployment mechanism is near instant, so your savings come from the time you are spending doing more development, rather than managing servers. If you wanted to hire an ops person, that's a cost savings.

  2) Scalability. As your system grows, Heroku manages architecture choices necessary for scaling all parts of your app. This is at the dyno web tier and database tier. But it also includes choices around architecting add-ons. For example, if you wanted to include their memcache add-on and you had multiple apps, should you create multiple memcache instances or one large grid? That sort of choice is handled behind the scenes.

  3) Add-Ons. They handle configuration, billing, and setup of any add-ons you might need. Biggest savings is not having to research all of them to figure out which ones are stable, viable, functional.

  4) Cheap to get started. You can deploy new apps for free, and migrate your code elsewhere if needed.

  5) Their polyglot strategy is interesting, and they are pushing the envelope with beta implementations around nosql data stores. There is a nice polyglot post on their blog.

  6) There is some performance advantages of using some of their add-ons. Because Heroku is deployed on EC2, and many of the add-ons are also on EC2, the integrated performance can be higher. EC2 ping rates are faster than gigabit ethernet in some cases.

  7) Creating identical environments. If you manage your own servers and you need to create staging, QA, or development servers, you'd have to create those manually and they'd be close, but not identical because there is different hardware involved. In debugging scenarios, being able to clone a whole app environment has some advantages.

  Good luck in your endeavor.

• by patio11 on 9/5/10, 6:32 PM

  BCC runs on a slice. A smaller client project runs on Heroku. I find Heroku requires less maintenance which is easy and more which is hard, like digging into Ruby gems to hack around why they are not working. By comparison, nginx configs and a thousand other things need to be done for VPSes, but the majority are straightforward or Googleable.

  Strong recommendation for the DIyer: deprec will save you a week.

• by jacquesm on 9/5/10, 8:41 PM

  Heroku is probably really great as long as you are small. Once you get serious you can host much cheaper on your own machines, but there will be additional (hidden) costs to factor in because you'll be spending more time on doing all the stuff that Heroku does for you. That's their added value, super easy deployment and keeping your stuff up and running. Cost wise it is fine as long as you're small enough to not notice you bill as a 'significant expense'. When that happens you should look in to running your own server, maybe first a virtual one, then move on to a dedicated server. That should allow you to scale to quite impressive size without breaking the bank.

• by thibaut_barrere on 9/5/10, 10:28 PM

  Here's my take:

  -> if time is more precious than money, go with Heroku.

  -> if money is more precious than time, go with Linode/SliceHost etc.

  You can change your mind later on (depending on scale increase cash etc), or even mix-and-match (eg: your workers on Linode, your front-ends on Heroku).

  Last point: some software (eg: sphinx) are not available on Heroku, and some others (eg: websolr) are quite costly compared to a roll-your-own setup.

• by techiferous on 9/5/10, 10:52 PM

  Start with Heroku. It's actually quite cheap for low traffic.

  At the same time, buy a $20/month Linode. Start playing around with it by setting up toy web sites and web apps. If you don't have experience setting up a server, then it's important to be experimenting with one for a long time because it takes a while to learn things. For example, you not only have to install and configure all of the necessary software, you have to think about security and resource utilization (memory, CPU, disk). You also are going to want to set up some server monitoring software such as serverdensity.com. And you're going to want to get used to managing web traffic (reading Apache logs, tuning Apache for performance, etc.). All of this takes time. But if you do this then if the time comes for you to switch away from Heroku, you will have experience setting up and managing your own web server.

• by atldev on 9/5/10, 9:29 PM

  I recently launched a small project (http://statusdashboard.com) with the goal of learning RoR and was blown away by the community and infrastructure (particularly Heroku). 3 weeks from watching the first blog railscast to a fucntioning site (with SSL, recurring billing, monitoring, etc.). I've also setup a VPS and started learning how to host myself (I think it is always better to understand how the magic happens).

  Heroku definitely hides the complexity of their "magic". It just seems to work so effortlessly.

  However, my biggest question so far is this: what is the best practice for managing and maintaining the DB? I'm used to jumping into the db for routine tasks, ad-hoc reporting, and troubleshooting. Amazon RDS would make it easier, but a bit pricy for my needs right now. I also understand you can db pull, but I've heard a few examples of data loss when attempting a pull/push roundtrip with a local PostgreSQL instance. So, I find myself spending time in the Heroku console, manipulating the data in code, manually.

  What do you do to manage/report on data in the DB? I'm preparing to launch a number of larger projects, but need to get a better system in place first.

• by dirtyhand on 9/5/10, 7:45 PM

  I've used both Engine Yard Cloud and Heroku. They're both great and have their pros and cons. Both are also powered by Amazon EC2.

  The only major downside with Heroku is if there is any downtime within their infrastructure, your app will also go down. This has happened a couple of times in the last 3-4 months, and it took a lot of big sites down.

  Engine Yard Cloud setups are self-contained and can be locked down to whatever setup, cloud version you're happy with. If they update their cloud setup, you don't have to update your instance anymore.

  It also seems like you can get more "bang for your buck" with EY once you start needing more computing/db power

• by aaronbrethorst on 9/5/10, 6:22 PM

  I am totally in favor of Heroku. Like other folks have pointed out, it's far cheaper (at least at first) to scale up on Heroku than to hire an ops person. I think that outgrowing Heroku, or finding that your real costs would be lower by going elsewhere or buying hardware, is a good problem to have.

  I would much rather spend my time building my product than dealing with all of the fiddly bits of managing web servers, databases, full text search setup, security, patching, etc.

  If need arises, migrating off Heroku in the future shouldn't be too challenging.

  Also, if you do choose to try out Heroku, pick up my iPhone/iPad app for managing your Heroku applications (http://dopplerapp.com). Good luck!

• by mark_l_watson on 9/5/10, 6:45 PM

  There is no lock-in using Heroku. Start with it and if you later want to move, just get a VPS of the appropriate size, apt-get install PostgreSQL, install RVM, and then the Ruby you want and required gems. Once you do this a few times, it takes very little time. As another poster mentioned, make sure you setup cron backups to S3, etc.

• by marshally on 9/5/10, 5:57 PM

  Heroku is a great way to get your app up and out there quickly. Get in front of users and then iterate on your product. The perceived cost of Heroku won't turn out to be an issue until you've scaled out to many dynos.

  Don't fret optimizing your hosting bill until it gets large enough to be an issue!

• by jarin on 9/5/10, 6:31 PM

  I like Heroku, but if you want your own server (so you don't have to pay for outgoing email or cron jobs or DelayedJob), you can set up an Ubuntu 8.10 server super easily with Moonshine. I gave a talk about it at SD Ruby a while back.

  http://jarinheit.posterous.com/a-talk-i-gave-at-sd-ruby-depl...

• by joe-mccann on 9/5/10, 6:09 PM

  Heroku is awesome for ruby development. If you're attempting node.js development, they do have a private beta (which I've tested), but is somewhat limited as I believe it uses an NGINX proxy so doing something like websockets with node.js (currently on Heroku) is not possible.

  git push master heroku

  is reason enough to give it a shot.

  Joyent may be another option...

• by andrewvc on 9/5/10, 6:09 PM

  Use Heroku. The cost of acquiring or hiring the sysadmin knowledge is going to far exceed just using Heroku. This includes Heroku's main competitor, Engineyard.

  EY has its upsides (and downsides), but definitely requires more sysadmin experience.

• by yogsototh on 9/5/10, 6:55 PM

  We did all manually before. Now we use heroku. For a small/medium sized project it is just perfect. We replaced about 1 to 2 days of works by 10 minutes with heroku. I cannot recommend it enough.

  It took only 3 hours to adapt our projects to heroku. Compared to many days working on hosting ourselves our projects. Because the longer is not to set up the environment but to choose what will be the best. I believe the heroku team made the best choice for me.

• by paulsingh on 9/5/10, 7:26 PM

  Heroku's definitely easier to setup and use - it's usually the right choice when you're first starting out and/or you don't have any advanced needs.

  I don't use it much anymore - I stick to Moonshine and the Rackspace Cloud. The setup and management of a private slice is super easy and, IMHO, it's worth the small amount of extra work to setup.

• by msie on 9/5/10, 7:03 PM

  I think the most important thing is getting something up and running quickly because you don't know where the design of the system will lead and you don't need the distraction of setting up a server. Don't waste more than a week fretting over this issue. Even a week is too much! During development you can still consider this issue so it's not an either-or thing. You're still developing in rails and can easily move your system to a standalone server. You're just delaying the cost of hiring a system admin or training one while you spend your valuable time in creating a working system which is very valuable in terms of figuring out the design of it.

• by consultutah on 9/5/10, 5:01 PM

  Heroku is great for site that might work out and might not. The initial cost is zero, but you can scale out as needed. Hopefully youve structured your business properly so that herokus cost is a small percentage of revenue.

• by jarrold on 9/5/10, 5:57 PM

  Heroku is awesome. Not only does it work well, it also encourages best practices.

• by logandk on 9/7/10, 10:00 PM

  Although I love Heroku, and it really is a great platform, I find that, for my startup and personal projects, the costs hold me back from doing some things.

  Say I need to run a simple background job, that would be $36/month - almost 2 linodes. And with the excellent articles on http://articles.slicehost.com, I find that setting up a vps takes no more than a few hours. Plus, it's a lot of fun and a good learning experience!

  I don't see how Heroku could do it much cheaper though, when you look at the pricing of Amazon EC2 instances which their platform runs on.

• by DanielRibeiro on 9/5/10, 6:50 PM

  Heroku is great. But, if you use something a bit outside ruby/add-ons (which is a lot, including NoSql databases, Apigee, and lots of other great services), you will need to move.

• by friendstock on 9/5/10, 5:42 PM

  definitely use heroku if you are using a ruby framework. we've had a much better experience than with managing our own EC2 server or using RightScale

• by chuhnk on 9/5/10, 6:52 PM

  Im a sys admin and have to administrate dedicated servers at work but choose to use heroku for personal projects just for ease of deployment.

• by gunmetal on 9/5/10, 8:32 PM

  I recommend heroku for starting out and and getting your apps some traction or whatever, then if/when you make more money hire a sys admin and migrate to something else if you want.

  I really love heroku though, especially after setting up my own servers on media temple for rails apps (which sucks using passenger).

• by waratuman on 9/5/10, 9:56 PM

  Use Heroku is the simple answer. Unless you have specific needs for background processing or do some stuff that is not in Ruby, use Heroku. This is especially true if you have not set up a production system before.

• by waxman on 9/5/10, 8:01 PM

  Definitely go with Heroku for two reasons: time savings (no sysadmin is huge!) and flexibility (you can always migrate later, which is easy since almost all of their stack is open-source).

• by swilliams on 9/5/10, 6:50 PM

  Question about heroku: I know that they have delayed_job support, but I need something that will kick off a DJ call every 5 minutes or so. The hourly cron add-on just won't cut it.

• by grinich on 9/5/10, 8:54 PM

  Come ask James at Startup Bootcamp :-)

  http://startupbootcamp.mit.edu/#speakers

• by points on 9/5/10, 10:18 PM

  If you don't have experience in setting up a server, wtf not? Learn it. It's kinda useful.