Heroku Pricing vs VPS (Linode,Slicehost) | Hacker News Reader

Heroku Pricing vs VPS (Linode,Slicehost)

4 pointsgrep7 comments

Hey,

I have a new app that hopefully will have many users and is going to require more than the FREE Heroku plan (hosted on Heroku atm).

Does anyone have experience in scaling apps on Heroku? What's the price comparing with scaling on a VPS system?

I'm not sure if I should stay on Heroku or migrate to a VPS such as Linode.

Thanks.

View on HN

Hosting costs will be much less with a VPS. For one CPU core with of processing and 20GB of storage it's $123 per month from Heroku and for $79.95 per month you can get a Linode 1440. However, if you need to scale easily Heroku can handle that for you and you'll have to do it yourself with a VPS.

I see.

Can I assume that 1 Dyno is more or less equivalent to a Linode 360?

Also, how much data can you insert in a 5MB DB?

Thanks.

Heroku says one dyno is 1/4 of a CPU core so I'd guess it's much less processing power than a Linode 360. How many columns you can insert into a 5MB DB depends on the size of the columns, but definitely not enough for a site with many users.

Ok. So I guess is obvious which one to pick except if you really hate sysadmin stuff, otherwise I don't think the price is worth it.

Thanks.

A dyno or two should be able to handle a boatload of traffic for a well-designed "typical" web app. See http://docs.heroku.com/dynos#dyno-concurrency-and-scaling for their performance claims (10-100 req per sec). Remember that with proper caching the number of reqs that actually hit a dyno may be a lot less than the number incoming (with Heroku you get a Varnish cache for free).

Unless your app gets truly impressively large traffic, or your app is so trivial that you have plenty of spare time for sysadmin tasks, Heroku is quite reasonably priced.

Hopefully? Worry about that problem when you get there. I bet you would be surprised about how far you could go with the free plan.

Yes. I just wanted to know how much I will be surprised by using the FREE plan.

thanks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com