Hacker News Reader

Comment by SpikeGronim | Hacker News Reader

My question to you is, could you do better and how much would it cost? If you didn't use Heroku or another cloud provider you would pay a lot more up front to get your applications running. When things go wrong you would have to fix it, which means paying technical staff to be on call. Since you and your company are likely experts in your domain and not in infrastructure then any infrastructure that you built would likely have more downtime than Heroku. You have to debit the cost of Heroku's downtime from the cost of building your own infrastructure.

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with Heroku and I don't use their service.

View on HN

You have to debit the cost of Heroku's downtime from the cost of building your own infrastructure.

That's silly, and also not how it works, at all. You're paying PaaS/IaaS companies so that it's their headache, not yours. Once it becomes your headache, they are no longer doing their job, and you are no longer receiving value for which you are paying for. You don't debit the cost of their downtime from the cost i would've built your infrastructure, you debit the cost of their downtime from your business' revenue and reputation.

Whether or not you could do it better yourself does not excuse the downtime one bit.

Excusing or not excusing are irrelevant.

If you stop using Heroku and manage your own infrastructure, you need to take all relevant costs into account.

Of course, finding an alternative provider of the same (or similar) services is also an option.

Isn't it commonly recognized that it's cheaper to run your own hardware than to pay a cloud provider? It just requires more capital outlay and maintenance.

We're actively sending pay per click traffic to our online store and it's very easy to spend hundreds of dollars. When our traffic converts it's great but it pains me to think I could be sending traffic to a Heroku 503 error page and have zero control over it.

So, "could we do better"? I'm not sure. I'm trying to figure that out. It certainly would not be as easy to use as Heroku or easy to deploy. But at a minimum I need to get some other host option set that we can switch over to.

Is there a service that will switch off adwords campaigns if your site is down or in maintenance mode? If not, there should be.

Thought about writing an app to do that. Unfortunately I would not be able to host it on Heroku. :-)

I've had clients with sloppy dev teams who decided to change the URL structure of all landing pages without letting me know (I was managing their PPC campaigns). Google stops serving ads after getting 404 errors - unfortunately I don't think they count other errors (like a 503) and they don't stop until they've sent a few hundred (or thousand) clicks.

would ppl pay for a good solution here, like $10 a month, or a % of money saved? I imagine that with a good implementation they might.

If you run your own site and things go wrong, you (hopefully) know what you did. When Heroku (or AWS, or anyone) makes a change, they don't consult every customer to find out if now is a good time to go down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com