[aelaguiz]

The complaints of what amounts to essentially support contract extortion are something that I've personally experienced.

They were literally ignoring our repeated customer service tickets pleading for assistance or a phone call or something. We were paying them hundreds of dollars per month at the time.

When we finally got through the only people we could get ahold of were salesman. Essentially we were made to believe that only for $1000/mo support contract would we receive customer support.

FWIW Our issue was frequent network timeouts to other ec2 services which were. They did eventually resolve those after months and never did they assist us.

Heroku's platform is a significant accelerator of development for a startup. Using the platform has enabled us to do things faster and better than we'd otherwise be able to do them for the money and time we've invested.

That being said, I look forward to they day they have a true/viable competitor and are forced to compete on service. I'm extremely bitter towards them at the moment as a result of my customer support torture experience.

[ollysb]

Yes I got bitten by their lack of customer support a couple of weeks ago. I did a release and the rails asset pipeline stopped precompiling the resources. I'd tested in staging so this came as a bit of a surprise. I promptly rolled back to the previous release(had been working fine for days) only to find that that now was broken as well. With my production app now broken I fired off a request for support. At this time we were running 8 dynos and 3 workers(not to mention a bunch of addons). This was also Saturday afternoon, which turned out to be a bit of a problem, I received an auto-response saying that support was only available Monday to Friday! Paying the premium rates for heroku and not receiving support for a production failure really was a bitter pill to swallow. We're running fast at the moment and don't have time to switch off but when we do will certainly be looking at the options.

[wmf]

Nah, I think Heroku is pretty principled. There's no amount of money you can pay them to get working load balancing or multi-region reliability.