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by jpcx01 5664 days ago
Doesn't it seem a bit "me too"ish? Seems like a super crowded market with extremely capable competitors. Heroku was able to sneak in since they were the first company to offer a service like this for rails. With Joyent's amazing no.de platform, I can't imagine any business deciding to base their infrastructure on a tool that a couple developers just started and doesn't yet have stable funding or a proven business.

Just my 2 cents. The landing page looks great. Hope they can pull through.
2 comments
barfoomoo 5664 days ago
Not an RoR user but wasn't Engine Yard there before Heroku? I am assuming Engine Yard and Heroku offer something similar. I might be wrong.
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jpcx01 5663 days ago
EngineYard was doing uber expensive fully managed rails hosting at the time Heroku go started. Wasn't till over a year after Heroku launched that EY launched their alternative (Solo->Cloud->??). Pretty good tools, but fairly different than Heroku. They focus on managing EC2 instances instead of Heroku's "Dynos" (small abstracted chunks of easily scalable server resources).

To me EY seems like a much better version of Linode + install scripts that are targeted to Ruby users. Heroku seems to me more like Google's AppEngine, except much more expensive and without the autoscaling.

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puredemo 5663 days ago
Isn't it a little strange selling a company for $212M that is essentially just reselling EC2 with a better UI? Maybe it's just me..
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thegoleffect 5663 days ago
Not to mention the completely open source alternatives like http://getbeehive.com (which has been adapted to use Node.js already).

But on the other hand, Heroku doesn't solve every problem - here's hoping there is more room in the market!

Besides, one could argue that Google, Heroku, etc also sounded 'me-too'-ish.

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