[gingerlime]

for me, one of the most important aspects are vendor lock-in. Maybe it's irrational, but I don't like to depend on a single vendor, however good it might be.

I use Linode and AWS, and used Rackspace and probably half a dozen smaller VPS providers in the past. Most of them I ditched, some I still use occasionally, some I might use more in future.

With all of these providers I know I can switch away from in a moment's notice (if the need arises).

If PaaS became standard / compatible across vendors, I would definitely consider Heroku, Engine Yard or whoever else in this space. Until then, I'd rather have this sense of freedom, even if irrational.

[onemorepassword]

I've been doing IT for over 25 years, and I can assure you there's nothing irrational about fearing vendor lock-in.

I'm all in favor of using services like Heroku if you're in a very early start-up phase with less than a handful of people or for weekend side-projects, but once you start building a serious business depending on a PaaS is just as suicidal is letting your business depend on someone else's API.

This invariably ends in drama.

[dimzava]

>> is just as suicidal is letting your business depend on someone else's API.

Well, I would tend to agree with you for APIs such as LinkedIn's and Twitter's, but not sure whether this would be the case with GitHub for example.

What's your view/experience on this?

[onemorepassword]

There's a reason I'm running full nightly mirrors of all of our private and public GitHub repositories...

The same applies to services. They can end tomorrow. Well, maybe not that fast, but how fast can you shift your business to an alternative without paying a terminal penalty?

We can't run without GitHub for more than a week, so we have to be able to get out in less. Same goes for AWS. Besides snapshots we run old-school backups to ensure we can recover on old-fashioned bare-metal if necessary.

Using those services, great. Letting our business depend on them? Never.