Startup Heroku (YC W08) Now Hosting 40,000+ Apps | Hacker News Reader

Startup Heroku (YC W08) Now Hosting 40,000+ Apps

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54 pointshshah21 comments

Perhaps this isn't the best place to say this, but since Heroku is a YC company, maybe someone is listening:

I want to use Heroku for some upcoming projects, however they require the uploading of high-res images. Every time I've tested things on their free plan:

- Uploads over 5mb cause errors 50% of the time

- Some ImageMagick functions don't seem to be available

Are these limitations that paying plans don't experience? Or are my needs simply out of the scope of Heroku's target market?

I want to give you my money :) ... (BTW, congrats on all the growth)

> - Uploads over 5mb cause errors 50% of the time

the free plan only has 5mb of storage

Storage limits are for database data only, they don't apply to assets like uploads. Assets should be stored in an asset store, like S3.

I use direct uploads to S3 to get around this. It works much better as a long term solution and you can easily do image processing somewhere else in the background.

Exactly. Most people use DelayedJob to do image processing in the background - also the correct/scalable way to do it. More here:

http://docs.heroku.com/background-jobs

http://docs.heroku.com/delayed-job

Right, but doesn't this effectively double or triple your bandwidth usage on S3? (since you're uploading, downloading, then re-uploading)

Transfer between S3 and your Heroku app (which lives inside EC2) is free.

Thanks for the feedback.

=== ImageMagick

We have a couple thousand apps using ImageMagick/RMagick, and haven't had any reports of missing functions. We are running ImageMagick 6.2.4 (will be updated to 6.3 sometime soon), so you might check that, and also be sure you aren't trying to use custom-compiled options. If you still have trouble, open a ticket and we'll take care of it: http://support.heroku.com/tickets/new

=== Uploads

We also have thousands of apps doing large file uploads. They should be done as described here: http://docs.heroku.com/s3

Specifically, for larger uploads (we recommend for anything bigger than 4MB), it's wise not to run the upload direct to a dyno, tying up one of your app servers and risking a timeout - it's just not a scalable way to do it. A good pattern is to upload direct to S3 instead, as directed at the bottom of the page. We recommend the S3 SWF Upload plugin: http://github.com/GreenAsJade/s3-swf-upload-plugin/tree/mast...

Thanks James. I appreciate the info.

Right now, I prefer to upload to the local filesystem then process and store on S3 via DelayedJob. But I will give this a try.

Are there any plans for add-ons that allow EBS storage (or something along those lines)?

We aren't planning to provide any additional types of file storage, as we don't believe that the local file system should be used at all in a scalable app, as it creates state at the app server.

We do provide access to /tmp if you need scratch file space for processing (it is not persistent between requests). More info here:

http://docs.heroku.com/constraints#read-only-filesystem

Does anyone know who did the artwork for the site? It's beautiful stuff.

Example: http://heroku.com/pricing#ronin-1

I'm writing an article for DevX as we speak for Heroku deployments.

I think that Heroku is a good alternative for some applications where saving money by managing your own EC2s is offset by decreased development and admin costs. I'm also writing about Heroku deployments that use remote CouchDB or MongoDB services.

We've seen a ton of Couch and Mongo apps lately - works very well with Heroku. Check out http://www.mongohq.com.

Congrats Heroku. We've been building our app on Heroku for a few months now, and it's been a great experience. Seems like we bug oren@heroku.com almost every day, and his responses are always quick and helpful. Keep up the good work and the great customer service!

Are they still supporting the herokugarden editor? That thing was awesome since designers could get started w/o installing anything at all.

Feels like they are no longer supporting that. Is that right?

Correct, the editor is no longer supported. We hope to bring it back sometime in the future.

Now that will be specially interesting for people that want to develop using Chrome OS computers.

You could build on bespin, they have git and hg hook, I guess a heroku hook would be less work than supporting a whole editor.

The problem with the editor is that it gave people the impression that Heroku was a toy, which is what I thought when I tried it.

I retried it 2 months ago and saw it is definitely not a toy. I think it rocks. I love that recent article with the headline 'you have to be an idiot not to use Heroku'.

Any idea how many paying clients they have? I know they offer a fremium (which is good).

congrats!

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