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Comment by jeswin | Hacker News Reader

Is there any value anymore in using a platform or service like Heroku or MongoHQ? You could get a decent VM for as little as $5, and deployment isn't really as much of a pain anymore. IMO, using all these different services takes more time, is more expensive, and is less flexible.

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I agree with you, up to a point. You need someone with some experience to set those things up. I mean, obviously even with these alternate solutions you still need to be security conscious. However, I went the AWS route and set up my whole environment running Ubuntu Server with Apache/RDS/S3... but despite all of my best efforts, I'm a programmer. I'm so afraid that I left some stupid setting in some obscure file unchanged that will give someone a backdoor to my server or database. With some of these platforms as a service they force you to use best practices, where you could set it up yourself with a not-so-strong password or something.

You can get a VM cheaply, but then you have to manage everything yourself. I don't have a lot of experience in this field and would be completely lost if something suddenly goes down or I need to scale. With Heroku and MongoHQ, you don't have to worry about these things anymore and its really easy to set up. And for someone like me who would need several hours in setting up everything on my own server, even the paid plans don't sound too expensive.

I would agree with this except for the, "you don't have to worry about it." If it scales by a huge amount over a weekend when you get some exposure, for example, then the costs can surely increase very quickly?

I think I would rather have things overload and go down than have a remote service be able to handle it but charge me a fortune.

You make a very good point. But I would rather have a business model in place which means that if things overload, so does my bank account.

I wish more startups would start up with this premise in mind, as at the moment I'm looking for specific services for my company, and I have the added task of trying to determine if the cool startup I'm looking at has a business model in place so that I don't have to worry about looking for a replacement for them next year when they close down.

(And yes, I'm looking for stuff which my company can pay for, not freebies)

The only services with my payment information are Heroku and Amazon. On Heroku, the first dyno is completely free and it doesn't increase the number of dynos automatically. But when you have heavy traffic, you can easily scale the number of dynos.

Amazon does charge automatically and doesn't have a limit on the maximum amount I want to spend, so there is a risk there. But then, its not too expensive even if I get a lot of traffic.

Yep, I was thinking about it.

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