[spronkey]

I'm astounded at the number of "$60k hires a good sysadmin and some EC2 resources" comments. You guys clearly don't understand exactly what Heroku (or a similar service) offers - providing it works.

There's a concept called a Bus Factor. Basically, it's the number of people who, if hit by a bus and made otherwise unusable, it would take to completely rail your business.

With $60k spent on a single sysadmin and an army of EC2, that's a pretty effing small bus factor - 1. So... that one guy gets taken out of action, and they're more or less toast? Yeah, no. Heroku gives them a massive bus factor for perhaps a little bit more money than it would take to cheap it themselves. It's a cheap way to avert risk.

They're probably at the size now where they could handle taking it in-house, but you've still then got to factor in hiring, developing the procedures for ops inhouse etc., and migrating. It's not easy to just flip the switch.

In any case, Heroku's behaviour is pretty shoddy. Though, knowing how much of a pain documentation is, I'm not surprised. I don't think they realised just how bad the change from intelligent to random routing actually was - and didn't treat it as such. This is giving them benefit of doubt though, because the other option is that they didn't publicise it precisely because they knew how bad it is. Scary thought.