Ask HN: Heroku or Not?

BCC runs on a slice. A smaller client project runs on Heroku. I find Heroku requires less maintenance which is easy and more which is hard, like digging into Ruby gems to hack around why they are not working. By comparison, nginx configs and a thousand other things need to be done for VPSes, but the majority are straightforward or Googleable.

Strong recommendation for the DIyer: deprec will save you a week.

There is no lock-in using Heroku. Start with it and if you later want to move, just get a VPS of the appropriate size, apt-get install PostgreSQL, install RVM, and then the Ruby you want and required gems. Once you do this a few times, it takes very little time. As another poster mentioned, make sure you setup cron backups to S3, etc.

I am a Heroku fan. Some things for you to consider: 1) The real value of Heroku is time savings. Their deployment mechanism is near instant, so your savings come from the time you are spending doing more development, rather than managing servers. If you wanted to hire an ops person, that's a cost savings.

2) Scalability. As your system grows, Heroku manages architecture choices necessary for scaling all parts of your app. This is at the dyno web tier and database tier. But it also includes choices around architecting add-ons. For example, if you wanted to include their memcache add-on and you had multiple apps, should you create multiple memcache instances or one large grid? That sort of choice is handled behind the scenes.

3) Add-Ons. They handle configuration, billing, and setup of any add-ons you might need. Biggest savings is not having to research all of them to figure out which ones are stable, viable, functional.

4) Cheap to get started. You can deploy new apps for free, and migrate your code elsewhere if needed.

5) Their polyglot strategy is interesting, and they are pushing the envelope with beta implementations around nosql data stores. There is a nice polyglot post on their blog.

6) There is some performance advantages of using some of their add-ons. Because Heroku is deployed on EC2, and many of the add-ons are also on EC2, the integrated performance can be higher. EC2 ping rates are faster than gigabit ethernet in some cases.

7) Creating identical environments. If you manage your own servers and you need to create staging, QA, or development servers, you'd have to create those manually and they'd be close, but not identical because there is different hardware involved. In debugging scenarios, being able to clone a whole app environment has some advantages.

Good luck in your endeavor.

Question about heroku: I know that they have delayed_job support, but I need something that will kick off a DJ call every 5 minutes or so. The hourly cron add-on just won't cut it.

We did all manually before. Now we use heroku. For a small/medium sized project it is just perfect. We replaced about 1 to 2 days of works by 10 minutes with heroku. I cannot recommend it enough.

It took only 3 hours to adapt our projects to heroku. Compared to many days working on hosting ourselves our projects. Because the longer is not to set up the environment but to choose what will be the best. I believe the heroku team made the best choice for me.