[jyap]

The problem with Heroku is that you need to be a certain level of tech savvy to make use of their services.

We're expecting them to be the A-Grade tech wizards who can give us 0 down time. They are after expecting thousands of people to trust their services and to outsource the server hosting and administration duties to them.

So they tread the fine line between convenience (and related "cloud" benefits) and "I can do this myself".

If they can't give us the assurances that they can do it better, cheaper and more reliably than we can do it ourselves then what good are they?

If they can't capacity plan a simple System Status page (running on Rackspace) and keep that up and running then what good are they?

And since their service appeals to a certain level of geek competence, they also can't get away with techno babble bull shit responses to outages.

[larrys]

"We're expecting them to be the A-Grade tech wizards who can give us 0 down time."

Exactly. But something like this which they said makes them seem so ordinary:

"The improved status site allows users to subscribe to notifications when an incident is opened. As a result, our status site experienced unprecedented spikes of load during this incident. This high load crushed the site,"

Basically saying whatever they setup for a status site choked on sending out emails or sms, as if they were hosted on a shared server and got mentioned simultaneously on a few major sites.