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Comment by Zaheer | Hacker News Reader

Anyone have experience with Heroku alternatives like Openshift Origin?

I've worked on Cloud Foundry. It has the fastest growing sales of any open source product in history.

Mostly, I trust the way it's built. Apart from components integrated from upstream, every line is TDD'd and 100% pair programmed.

You can use public installations on Pivotal Web Services (by the company I work for) or BlueMix (by some plucky startup from Armonk). Or you can install your own on OpenStack, vSphere or AWS.

Cloud66 is a pretty close match to Heroku.

Cloud 66 provides full stack container management as a service in production, that offers Heroku-like functionality on any cloud provider or on your own server, http://www.cloud66.com/ (Disclaimer: I work at Cloud 66)

Is it standard nowadays to charge customers for support? Checking out the pricing (and correct me if I'm wrong), does it really cost $5000/month to have 24/7 support? That seems crazy to me.

Now granted I pay about $300/month for the VM I have with my hosting provider, but I can pick up a phone at any hour and talk to a tech when things go south.

I really don't care how good a service is, I want to talk with a breathing human being when my business is down.

> $300/month for the VM

High-availability, automatic failover, managed, with diamond-cut SSDs I hope? Who are you with? For that money you should just pick up a box.

When a typical developer or admin cost is $50 or so an hour, $300 isn't a material amount, and there are use cases where it's not just about whether a single VM less or more than the cost of a single physical server.

(We've been customers for well over a year, close to 18 months I think)

You do get support for no additional fee, but you can pay for additional access to support staff. That said, they've always been quite responsive to our requests, with a fairly short turnover time by email.

It is however customary in the industry to pay for additional levels of support:

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/ https://www.heroku.com/critical

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