[davestheraves]

Sounds to me that the main issue was running out of RAM on workers. Would this not be soved by moving to another cloud provider (such as AWS) where you are not limited to the tiny RAM provided on Heroku?

Is this not similar in strategy to choosing hardware and spinning up your own stack?

EDIT: I getting at the rather sweeping statement against all cloud providers based on a specific Heroku problem

[Xylakant]

The moment you do this, you forego one of the biggest advantages of using heroku. As long as you're on heroku only, you don't need to take care of securing the underlying stack - that is firewall rules, OS-updates, general maintenance. The moment you spin up a single AWS instance besides it, it's your problem. Depending on your use-case it could be a better choice to just go all the way to dedicated hardware: The primary advantage AWS has over dedicated hardware is flexibility. You can spin up instances depending on your current need. If your load behavior is a flat, predictable curve you might just not need that - and then real hardware is cheaper in most cases.

[mark_l_watson]

I had the same thought: why not run the workers on a few large memory EC2s and use Heroku for everything else. Run on east coast region for free bandwidth between Heroku and EC2s.