Recent experiences with Heroku? | Hacker News Reader

Recent experiences with Heroku?

8 pointsvitobotta7 comments

Hi all,

I went to a job interview yesterday for a very interesting new role; I would basically be starting and heading a new branch of the company with upcoming big projects and the company seems to be very keen to use Heroku a lot for the deployment.

I have been using own servers / VPS's for years (VPS.NET and especially Linode), so I have always had full control on what I could/needed to use, with basically no limits. But of course the overhead of the administration, while I have never had any real problems with it, is something that sometimes I would like to avoid to focus more on development etc. So in a way I like that this company is keen to use a PAAS provider.

I was just wondering however, how is Heroku doing these days? I've seen they've added a lot of addons etc, but I am wondering about performance and reliability as well. What's your experience with them so far? I am particularly interested about experiences with big projects with high traffic and perhaps a lot of backend processing.

Cost: it still looks to me like Heroku is more (or a lot more) expensive than running your own servers on Linode or similar; of course this is justified by the fact that the administration is taken care of for you. However I am wondering if you find anyway that the advantages of such a platform overcome the higher costs, in your case.

On a side note, have you experienced any big limitations or hiccups that have led you to move or consider a move out of Heroku for your projects?

Thanks a lot in advance for your insights.

How is heroku doing these days: Recently acquired by Salesforce and expanding their add-on range means that they will be around for a long time and it is promising that they are catering to a larger variety of developers.

Reliability: They run off Amazon web services which are continually expanding their regions. So they are highly reliable (especially after the EC2 outage in 2010).

Cost: In my experience, heroku has saved me a lot of time and my clients a lot of money. Yes, I can setup and manage my own servers and it can be for as little at $10/month. heroku on the other hand costs up to $100/month for my production servers. Why am I willing to pay this much? Because I put a higher price on my time than $100/month. I don't have to worry about infrastructure or redundancy issues. Furthermore, my clients can afford these hosting costs as I explain to them that $100/month is cheaper than my hourly rate if I have to troubleshoot network/server issues and also perform server maintenance... which none of these I have to do on heroku.

Limitations & hiccups: I've found that I've needed to employ alternative ways of doing things due to some minor heroku limitations. Overall, everything is achievable with some resourcefulness and some extra money.

Overall, heroku is easy to get started with, especially if you've got sys admin experience! Hope this helps and good luck with your job interview!

And today I eat my words regarding the reliability :)

LOL Can you believe that I searched this discussion I started just to see if somebody would change mind since then? :D

Their limitation on cron jobs was kind of a deal breaker for me. They allow you to run either a daily cron job (free), or an hourly cron job ($3 per month), but I enjoy the flexibility of a VPS and being able to run cron jobs however I see fit. This is probably a pretty minor problem (if even a problem at all) for most people.

Heroku has a couple of ways to get more granular process frequency. You can use Resque on top of the RedisToGo addon to get scheduleable processes. It's also possible to use the SimpleWorker addon to accomplish the same thing in a very cost-effective manner (i.e. not bound to workers).

Wonderful, thank you for your comments. I can definitely see what you mean about the cost of your own time, and all makes more sense now if Heroku is as reliable et all as you suggest.

@jrsmith1279, Have you tried to schedule tasks directly from within your app with Rufus Scheduler, instead of Cron?

How much do you get paid per-hour?

Hoe many hours will you spend wrangling you servers?

Each month.

If heroku doesn't make sense you aren't getting paid enough.

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