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Comment by chao- | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. We are finally scaling from "small scale production" to having actual customers we want to take care of. Worse, we began a huge marketing push this week and had been seeing promising results. Now we'll probably miss a boatload of potential customers.

Heroku had been a joy to work with until now. I ask of you all (as most of you are far more experienced in these matters than I), what is the traditional practice to mitigate this sort of risk? Paying for hosting with two separate companies?

EDIT: I understand the benefits of cloud hosting over hiring a sysadmin. At the same time, I'm interested to learn about what possible solutions there are. I'm at the point where I don't know what I don't know, and even the name of a topic or technology would be a huge help.

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On June 1st (this month) they've had routing errors. On June the 5th (the day before yesterday) they again had routing errors.

My apps triggered errors left and right and I was bashing my head against the keyboard because I noticed the errors earlier than their status update and I believed it was our fault.

Plus this last week the latency of the requests have been incredibly high, while the traffic to my apps have not increased. Again I assumed it was my fault.

I'm contemplating moving back to EC2 or Linode.

Heroku is really good. You will probably have more downtime than them unless you hire a whole team of operations and admins and pay a lot of money for hosting. It may also take a while to build out the deployment and development tools they have.

Honestly, that's pious bullshit. It's the thing people keep saying every time Heroku gets mentioned is that it'd do better than you would yourself for availability, but you'd have to be borderline incompetent to have as much downtime with a more traditional VPS / hardware hosting to match the combined Heroku / AWS downtime.

We moved all but one of our Rails apps off of Heroku precisely because of the frequent downtime -- or, rather, that was the last straw; there were other issues, notably the difficulty in debugging production issues, that had us already debating such. Heroku has gotten somewhat better, but it's still down far more than anything else that we use. (And we have services spread across Linode, Rackspace, AWS and the mentioned one app on Heroku.)

You'll have better uptime in most cases with a standard nginx / passenger setup on a $20 VPS than you will with Heroku.

They are at 99.97% uptime. It's not that easy to get to even 99.5%, just the flakiness of a standard uplink will put you below that.

Huh? The flakiness of a standard uplink will have you down for 44 hours a year? On what planet? With our non-AWS hosting providers we tend to see 2-4 hours of network issues per year. Heroku's uptime also hasn't historically been anywhere near 99.97%. They were down for several days last year in The Great AWS Failure.

This is in the context of hosting it yourself, not using a different large-scale business provider.

I don't think anyone ever considers hosting it on a desktop in the closet on DSL at home/office.

The competition for something like Heroku is EC2, VPS, or dedicated servers, in commercial colocation facilities. A good hosting facility is going to be a lot closer to 99.995% uptime for network and power to the box, but you can of course screw up past that point on your own.

Having administered several "standard uplinks" from 100 Mbit/sec all the way to multiple ten Gbit/sec links, I can safely say that if your transit isn't 99.999%, you need new transit.

It's not that easy to get to even 99.5%

99.9% is very doable. If your sites have less then you should consider hiring better staff.

Also the heroku figure (99.97%) is a lie - just skim their status-page.

Yeah, I think Heroku is better than other options for being a fast/easy way to deploy, and great UI and some useful tools, but the combination of lack of visibility into internals for debugging, Heroku outages, and EC2 outages is the reason I don't use it for anything in production.

I'd seriously consider Heroku if they were in multiple regions (fuck AZs, those are a lie). There are huge advantages to a PaaS in terms of speed and lack of hassle, and a well run PaaS is better than most developers at operations, patching, security, etc. (We're kind of unique in that we're better at operations than development, though.)

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