[AznHisoka]

I actually thought deployment was a very challenging, nightmarish thing to do. Heroku, and EngineYard are charging me an arm and a leg - of course it must be hard as hell, right?

But I took the afternoon to learn how to actually deploy, and the next day, I cancelled my EngineYard account. It's not trivial, but on a scale of 1-10, it's a 3 or 4.

And even if you can't afford the time/energy to learn it (ie if you're a startup and just need to launch), you can easily do "poor man's" deployment just by sshing, "git pull", "bundle exec unicorn restart" (or something like that). Deploying an app on production is almost the same as deploying on your development machine. Why give Heroku your money when you can do it yourself?

[Kaedon]

That's true. For me, I view redundancy as one of the values of Heroku. If you're deploying on your own, that may still require provisioning additional servers as needed, manually backing up databases periodically, etc etc. It can be a time cost beyond just deploying it once in some cases. Still, is the cost of Heroku worth it? It's an important question and a personal one for most I think.

I tend to think of deployment as a challenging thing too but the more I discuss it the less I think of it as a mystery. Thank you for sharing.