Heroku: Announcing Huge Growth and New CEO

I only started working with Rails about 6 months ago and was blown away by how easy it is to deploy apps. The whole set up literally took 5 minutes, and I didn't even know how to use git. I seriously considered their paid plan for a side project. But then I found myself reason "yea, I'm paying a premium for the elegant deployment flow and easy scalability. I'll use an extra dyno and turn it off at night to keep cost low. Maybe I use ferret first and then if thing picks up I set up an EC2 for Solr or Thinking Sphinx. Permanent storage? Well, I'll force my users to post picture somewhere else initially." So then I started looking at Linode and Slicehost and found that it's not that bad, especially with Passenger.

I'm a potential customer, I love their simple design and can't stop promoting Heroku to friends. I hope they succeed in solving those limitations and keep cost down in a reasonable range so that I can happily give them my money.

I don't see how it's expensive at all.

We have 10k/month coming in from our iPhone app and use Heroku + S3 for everything. It lets us focus on getting our product up to speed instead of system administration, period. If's only expensive if your time is worthless, or you really, really want to pay a sysadmin to take care of your server stuff.

Right now we're paying them $200/month and I smile every time I get the bill- it's one of my favorite expenses because of how much time it saves. When we get up to 5k, it's still a no-brainer. At 10k, it's time to start looking at Rackspace, but that's about the limit of things for us.

It works, it saves time, and it lets us focus on improving our product.

I thought so. Until I had to set up a reliable, replicated and fail-over ready Postgres system. That's just not worth my time.

That's quite a significant itch that they're scratching then. Look at the figures - 36,000 deployed apps speak for themselves, and the quality of the platform suggests that the big spike is still to come.

It is expensive, but i've found the dynos to be quite a bit more powerful than you'd expect. for instance, i'm getting the same req/sec from 1 dyno as i get from 3 passengers on REE 187. The CPU speed/rendering time is not as fast (getting 300ms on Heroku vs 80ms on Linode) - which is likely due to ec2 hardware.

You could always use the database to track games between players.

AFAIK there's nothing stopping you from using Amazon's SimpleDB, especially since Heroku is already running on EC2.

Also, given the "SQL Databases Don't Scale" by Adam I would be very surprised if they don't roll out a more "scalable" alternative to Postgres in the near future.

I don't think it has yet.

It's really easy to connect to hosted NOSQL environments though, if that's your cup of tea. AFAIK there are some solutions for most of them: MongoHQ, Couch.io and another one for Redis I can't recall.

You could also do it yourself. Basically anything that is also on EC2 shouldn't affect performance too bad.

It hasn't changed (yet?), but you can always put your NoSQL datastore on your own EC2 instances. Or you could use it with something like MongoHQ (http://mongohq.com).

AppEngine is probably the closest.