[_lex]

I'd love to deploy on Heroku, but it's so dramatically more expensive than aws. For a startup, is it really worth that additional cost?

[dblock]

I think it's totally worth it. Right now it still costs us less than a developer to run on Heroku and not that long ago we were 3 of those devs. I think having our front-ends on EC2 along with setting up memcached/mongo/nginx/etc ourselves is a much higher upfront cost.

Then there're traffic spikes. Pretty hard to deploy to bare metal or EC2 instantly without building your own Heroku-like system.

[taligent]

Well this just shows how little you know about deployments.

Using something like Hudson/Jenkins can make deployments simple borderline trivial and EC2 supports ElasticBeanstalk which makes deployments a breeze.

[nthj]

> Well this just shows how little you know about deployments.

Exactly.

Which is that much more I know about shipping working products which make my clients money.

[oellegaard]

I use heroku for prototyping, which it is great for. I would not use it for larger projects in production (disclaimer: while also being a developer, I'm the company syadmin). If we measure downtime, heroku had much more downtime, than the servers we have internally - and I find heroku extremely slow compared to what I can deliver with basic hardware. Their database offerings are awesome, though.

[prezjordan]

Heroku is really just AWS with convenience, isn't it? I'm not sure what else they do - but I guess that "convenience" is worth it for some.

[zrail]

The convenience is totally worth it for prototypes and very early stage startups. The less work I do on a system level is more time I can spend on my startup.

Once you move past that, because your app is well structured you can easily deploy on your own hardware.

[jasonmccay]

Really? Do you work on your own car? Is it because you think you aren't smart enough to do it or because you think that spending your time on other efforts is a more valuable configuration?

AWS is the electric company. Heroku tends to be the circuitry, outlets and light switches for your house. You may take it for granted because it looks so simple, but it's the simplicity that makes it great.

As PaaS providers begin to mature and turn attention to more worthy challenges (like geo-agnostic deployments, easier scaling, for example), then their value is only going to increase.

[prezjordan]

Right, I was not disrespecting Heroku in any way - I truly do not know what product they sell. That being said, great analogy.

[gridaphobe]

Is it possible to launch using just a single dyno and heavy caching/optimization?

[thinkbohemian]

Heroku employee here, don't abuse the free. It's there for a design/prototyping/staging and as long as people don't abuse it will stay that way.

[oellegaard]

They will shut down your instance, if you don't use it for an hour or two - and then it will take like 8-10 seconds to load it again. If you can live with that, I guess that would work, yes.

[gkop]

There are very, very easy ways around this.

[citizens]

One being a service like http://uptimerobot.com/ that pings the site every 5 minutes

[dblock]

From what I see, when you have a single dyno, Heroku deploys you to a different environment sandbox called "development". Typically that has less uptime and takes lots of upgrades all the time with interesting consequences. I believe they promote to "production" applications much less frequently.

[adrianpike]

Depending on what you need to do to show off the product, absolutely. A static landing page should withstand just about anything you throw at it.

[kmfrk]

You pretty much just described the concept of PaaS. :)