You're An Idiot For Not Using Heroku | Hacker News Reader

You're An Idiot For Not Using Heroku

railstips.org

23 points_pius36 comments

I honestly never truly understood the value of services like engineyard and heroku (more accurately i guess i think i understand the value but am surprised by why so many would need it). It is quite a price premium you pay to save yourself from doing something that is pretty simple -- deploying rails, at the cost of losing full control. When I had to use engineyard for a client, I was really shocked by the prices and while they were really fast on support I just found it tedious to have to get someone else to try something that doesn't fit entirely into their 'optimized' stack of things.

you save a lot more than just deploying rails. You no longer have to administer a server, and don't under estimate how much work that is. You can create a server and maybe get away with administering it for a year or two, but eventually it will bite you in the ass.

The question people have to ask themselves is at what point is the cost of these services greater than the cost of administering their own servers. My feeling is that these services are great if you're running a small to medium site. If you have a large site, or run lots of small sites, or some combination, then you're probably better off doing it yourself.

Ah yes, the friendly, thoughtful tone so commonly associated with Rails-related discussion :)

The article actually is quite thoughtful and friendly ... ya know, if you actually read it. ;)

I did read it. I have no problem with the article (and I actually think both Heroku and RoR are brilliant), but the title is so DHH-like I couldn't resist.. I hope you don't take any offense, honestly none intended.

sadly, these types of titles are the way to get on the front page of sites like this.

The title puts me off reading it.

Perhaps "Heroku in Ruby solves <problem X>" ?

Aw, c'mon. The title's so over-the-top you can't take it seriously. I thought it was playful.

I guess I kind of did because there's a lot of hyped titles, so I tend to filter them out.

But you're right, we can take ourselves a bit seriously on HN.

It is not so over the top it is playful it is just an purposefully eye grabbing title/intro paragraph to get attention

You can be both playful and eye-grabbing. Example: "Buy this magazine or we'll shoot this dog."

And ironic, to boot. The author didn't start using it until shortly before he wrote the article.

I found the tone of the title and the whole article arrogant, rather than playful.

I can't help wondering at the small view of the world implied in the title. People are still creating interesting software applications that are not web apps. Those people won't give a damn about Heroku, and they are not idiots.

See, this is why it's a playful title and not a literal one, which is why so many literal-minded people don't like it. If you really take everything you read at face value, you're missing out on a lot of fun frivolities to be had. Life should not be so serious that a title of an article irritates you like that.

I'm pretty amazed by this whole thread, to be honest. Do people really believe that the author thinks they're idiots?

They'd have to be pretty goddamn stup...

Exactly. :)

I can promise I wasn't being arrogant. The title was just meant to catch eyes and only targeted at Ruby devs.

About as playful as 'You're an idiot if you take this comment seriously.'

Well, you are, aren't you? I mean, if my comment enlightens you, then take what you can from it. But if it doesn't, why the fuck should you care about it? It's an Internet comment. Either have fun with it or go find something you legit enjoy.

I don't know Ruby, or Rails. I guess I'm an idiot :(

No, but Heroku is pretty well known as a Ruby on Rails hosting service. Its had several articles available here on HN and has quite a bit of hype. Just saying, you are probably not an idiot. :)

You can certainly run Sinatra on Heroku, not just rails.

There's no way to implement a Comet solution on Heroku as far as I can determine. Please tell me I'm wrong!

I've asked Heroku employees about that, and they said that their infrastructure would not be the best for Comet long-polling applications. I'm sure they've developed everything assuming that requests would be short and if they were long then something is wrong.

Also, this post shows someone that has gotten taken by how easy deployment is on Heroku. It's good but the article mentions that the author took another look "yesterday". Still riding that high.

Please stop using emotionally charged words like "awesome" to describe something. It's pointless but then again I'm referring to an article that calls me names. Heh.

Awesome comment.

save cleverness for reddit please :)

"You can certainly run Sinatra on Heroku, not just rails."

More to the point, you can run any Rack-based app or app framework.

Indeed. Sorry for any confusion.

I'm an idiot for so many reasons that not using Heroku doesn't even break into my top ten list. As such, I'm not terribly worried about not using Heroku. In any case, thanks for reminding me that I'm an idiot.

Actually, I have used Heroku. The major con of the service is that you are losing control to Heroku which also loses control to Amazon's EC2 service (for example, inability to assign multiple IP addresses to an instance leads to $100 / month extra if you need secure pages.) The major pro for me is the ease of getting into it. Just a quick signup and a free level for getting started.

You're an idiot if you're willing to pay a middle man to deploy and manage your application's software stack.

And you're also an idiot if you pay someone else to change the oil in your car.

you're also an idiot if you eat out at a restaurant.

Does Heroku allow Ruby 1.9 ?

Not yet, at least not for general customers.

When Heroku was new I tried to move my site to it and it refused to do a migration that required a helper.

I checked carefully and it worked fine on my computer.

I wrote them about it and never got an answer.

I waited and they never fixed it so I went with a host.

Appertainly they've fixed it but I'm happy where I am.

www.jgsbws.com

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