Congrats Heroku: 100,001 deployed apps | Hacker News Reader

Congrats Heroku: 100,001 deployed apps

I just started using Heroku a week ago and I'm in love. (I kinda wish I was the 100,000th deployed.)

Heroku is the main reason why we moved from PHP to Ruby/RoR. My first encounter with RoR made me feel managing a Ruby server was a pain and resources never enough, but Heroku made me fall in love again. Now we have at least 10 apps with them.

100k sounds crazy high.

How many of these apps have seen a page-hit during the last month?

Interesting, I totally thought they would have hit this a while ago. For some reason I assumed they might have hit a magnitude higher. But I guess I totally misunderstood their popularity. Whoo echo chamber.

Well, just to ensure we're on the same page; this claims 100k concurrent, running apps.

If a significant portion of these apps were active then that would translate to a 6 figure hosting bill from amazon (per month!).

So either heroku is much larger than I thought, or most of these apps are not actually doing much.

Free apps get killed every 24 hours and wont start up again until they get a hit (http://www.mail-archive.com/heroku@googlegroups.com/msg04562...). Possibly there are some paid apps that aren't getting used, but why would you pay every month for an app no one uses?

So, the answer is: probably close to zero.

Probably > 95% of them are free apps with hardly any traffic.

But this is part of the beauty of Heroku. If you hack something together instead just storing it with "git push origin" you can do "git push heroku" and actually demo it to the world for free.

I like to think of Heroku's 100,000 apps as public demos of a lot of GitHub repositories.

Including mine. Love the service. It's sort of what I imagined hosting could be like but didn't think was possible. Anybody ever notice how cool the site design looks when you're working in the dark, late at night?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com