[moe]

Wow, lots of heroku praise here. Let's put that a bit into perspective.

Heroku is indeed great for starting out when you can get away with the free plan or need only a small number of dynos and ideally none of their addons. Heroku can be a beautiful launchpad during the bootstrap phase.

Once your heroku bill approaches about ~$500/month you should start looking elsewhere, though. Their pricing for larger deployments becomes outright hilarious above roughly that threshold.

And with hilarious I mean really hilarious, as in the $3500 price point for a 50G memcached instance. For that money you can also buy a physical server with 64G RAM every month, fresh from the factory...

[cletus]

Memory pricing for all shared/VPS hosting is simply bizarre. RAM is dirt cheap. I don't get it. It's almost like they all got together and decided to gouge on the one thing people need. It's this one factor alone that seems to make dedicated/colocation services a better option at about the point you mention.

[moe]

Memory pricing for all shared/VPS hosting is simply bizarre.

Not really. DIMM modules are fairly cheap but DIMM slots are not. Your average mid-range server can, in theory, be maxed out to 192G or even 256G RAM. But only if you use 8G or even 16G DIMMs - and those are still hideously expensive.

The most cost efficient configuration usually gravitates around 64G (16x 4G) nowadays, rarely higher.

So, when you factor in the cost overhead per server (rackspace, power/cooling, network infrastructure, maintenance) then it's not hard to understand why RAM is the most expensive ressource in the cloud.

[michaelhalligan]

So they gouge on the RAM but they generally give everything else at a very respectable price? Sounds reasonable to me. It's not too shocking actually .. If you're renting a $99/month server with 512MB of memory and 80gb of disk space, you're losing money on it unless it's an old, already amortized server. That RAM upsell might become all of the profit of that server.. also, limited ram and disk space means you can do less with your server, like use less power or less bandwidth.

[terrellm]

I agree - it's great to get started and get traction with an app but can become costly after a certain point. When I got to a point of needing several dynos, I went to Engine Yard which like Heroku takes care of all of the Amazon EC2 configuration.

Also, with deploy hooks at EY, I have command line deployment similar to Heroku's "git push heroku master" by using a specific command in your commit message 'git commit -am "[deploy myapp_production]" and then 'git push'.

[phylae]

Memcached is not run (or priced by) Heroku. That is an addon provided by a 3rd party (http://www.northscale.com/).

In addition, there is absolutely nothing stopping you from running your own, separate memcached server and pointing your Heroku app there. If you host it on EC2, then you should have very low latency to Heroku.

Heroku is obviously not perfect, but this particular criticism is not valid. That said, you can point this criticism at Northscale.