Ask HN: Where did the name Heroku come from? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where did the name Heroku come from?

4 pointsboggles6 comments

It sounds vaguely Japanese. I'm wondering if it's based on some Japanese word or how they came up with it. Anyone know?

All of their service levels, and server names, are japanese in nature so it's probably a safe bet.

Also the service is amazing! I had been using Slicehost for the last 2-3 years but I recently tried Heroku out and I love it, all of my latest projects are being hosted there.

Are you using the free version or a paid option? Because I find the non-free options to be vastly more expensive than hosting options elsewhere. They provide a valuable service in terms of taking administration issues out of the picture and letting you just focus on developing your app. But my feeling is this is not targeted at hackers who are surviving on rice and beans but rather those who are more likely to have well-paying day jobs. Not that there's anything wrong with that - it's a good business model - but since I'm in the rice and beans category at the moment, I'm not in their league I'm afraid.

I'll admit that it will definitely end up being more expensive over a more 'Hacker Focused' option like Slicehost. I think the reason that I like Heroku is that it makes my deployment/configuration easier in the same way that Rails makes app development easier. I know that there are guys over there who are implementing the Varnish cache correctly, setting up load balancing, implementing full text indexing, etc. It allows me to focus on my application and not on the thousands of configuration options that I have to think about if I'm the admin.

Now, with that said, once you start to grow your application the costs would probably start to add up rapidly and it may be in your best interest to roll your own, but in the beginning at least I think it's a great option for getting off the ground quickly and correctly.

Curious. When you look at the prices, how do you determine that it's vastly more expensive? What kind of assumptions or calculations are you making to come to that conclusion?

They wrote a program that would output Japanese-sounding words with a free .com domain. Seriously.

The term is merger of "Hero" and "Haiku". The Japanese theme is a nod to Matz for creating Ruby.

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