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Comment by pilif | Hacker News Reader

Dyno redundancy and DNS CNAMEs to protect the rest of the platform if YOU get DDOSed looks to me like things their customers have to do to compensate for shortcomings of the platform.

That's of course totally ok. What I dislike is how it's being sold as a feature or simple precaution.

Why should I pay double because they have to restart my vm? Why can't they bring up a new one and then kill my current one? Why are they talking about isolating DDOSed customers instead of protecting them?

Again, I can see these issues, but don't sell the workaround as a feature

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I'm a PM at Heroku. The dyno redundancy check has nothing to do with protecting the platform. It is a best practice for production apps to have redundancy at the web server level. This protects your app from downtime should underlying servers fail, or if the web server process were to crash. N+1 redundancy for the win.

Also, it does not cost customers double because the first dyno is free with each app.

Well then that's even more than double, it's from free to paid.

So it actually costs an infinite percentage more to run that second dyno ;-)

But I agree your points on redundancy at the webserver level.

You're actually going from a free app to a paid app.

We're talking about $34.50 a month for two dynos and $29.95 a year for DNSMadeEasy. Is this really an issue ?

re: DNS CNAMEs, thanks for the feedback! I've updated the relevant section:

> This ensures that in the event of an infrastructure-level issue, core components can be replaced without requiring you to make changes to your apps.

You are right, it's not about protecting the platform from an app being DDOSed - that example was far too specific. It's about ensuring that an app is configured take full advantage of the flexibility and redundancy that our infrastructure is designed to provide.

Huh? Ctrl+F "isolat" doesn't show any results.

Setting DNS CNAMEs to a Heroku-provided name make sense. They might make underlying infrastructure changes; that's why you're using them instead of rolling your own on a VPS.

Having more than one worker also seems sensible.

The article stresses that these checks are all optional. You don't have to pay double for anything if you don't want to.

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