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by nreece 5233 days ago
>> Even though AppHarbor's new pricing (IMO) does put off small projects and MVP projects

Their first instance (aka worker) is free so it can be easily used for small side-projects (but maybe not MVP's). The first instance has access to about half AWS ECU and 1GB of memory. A 20MB SQL Server Express database (on Shared server) is free.

I do agree however that their pricing (and that of cloud hosting in general) is a bit high for bootstrapped startups, considering the low cost of a VPS now-a-days. In many cases, it also takes a lot of time to make your app work seamlessly with cloud hosting, when you should be spending that time on finding customers.

Some issues (for us at-least) made us move to a VPS and implement our own CI environment for now (fully automated builds and deployments using TeamCity and MS Web Deployment). This is not to say that AppHarbor is not worth it, but we faced some issues:

1. Lack of sticky sessions forces you to work with Memcache, when IMO it's not really required in the initial stages of a product.

2. Another issue is the lack of persistent storage (file system), since AppHarbor (rightfully) wipes off the entire space on each deployment. It essentially forces you to design/redesign your app to utilize something like S3 right from the start. Again, 99% of the startups can live without worrying about all that in the initial stages of the product.

Every hour spent on pre-mature optimization and scaling without having any customers, is an hour wasted.
1 comments
philjones88 5232 days ago
Yes, the pricing change is fine if I just want to throw up some private side projects, but for an MVP product, no. With an MVP product I would want to have a custom domain to make it look more professional and to share with the world. Sure $10 a month isn't a huge deal but I have two MVP products on a VPS at the moment that barely get any traffic whilst I figure out feasibility and if they will work.

Heroku doesn't charge for custom domains, but I would prefer AppHarbor went PHPFog's way of only allowing 3 free apps and charge $5 for those to have custom domains.

I've written three blog posts on the whole AppHarbor pricing change and just believe they are missing a whole subset of the market. In my final blog post on their new pricing I suggested someone could potentially fill this void by providing a subset of AppHarbor features as a kind of "baby" AppHarbor that is designed for small hobby/MVP projects that don't need features like multiple workers, load balancing rather just a better experience (git push) over shared hosting (ftp).

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