11–20 of 63 posts
You might try https://www.engineyard.com/ instead. You might also want to look at Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk. Your "not loves" don't ring true for me though- perhaps you'd like to elaborate there? I've been running production apps on Heroku for more than 2 years now, and there has only been one occasion where their uptime impacted the apps' availability. Even during Hurricane Sandy, my apps were up 24/7, so it's hard…
I looked into AppFog, but it was not nearly customizable for my fairly intense Django app. I found too much of the configuration to be baked in.
On Heroku, I really like the ease of connecting third party services, and the fact that many of those services have free tiers. I love their New Relic pricing as well. I like that Foreman/Honcho make for a pretty awesome staging environment. What I don't like is the inability to directly connect to dynos.
So far, of the products I've tried, Heroku seems the closest to being fully baked, but it's still a ways away from hitting it out of the park. I'm really glad this question was brought up, even if it's quite frequently asked. There are so many players and the scene is so rapidly changing that information is constantly going out of date. It seems to me that what's really needed is some sort of ongoing comparison tool/site to track the whole PaaS scene.
We're also really happy about Dotcloud open-sourcing hipache and docker, and it seems like at least some sort of quasi-standardized PaaS-stack is in the near future, in the same way that you can shop around for LAMP hosts.
In my experience Dotcloud has the advantage of giving you more control over your instances and the ability to SSH into them. But I had issues with the reliability of deployment there. I used to love the sandbox, but I dropped Dotcloud as a provider after that was removed without a drop-in replacement. However, I still use them to serve Redis, and so far, it's way cheaper than using a dedicated Redis service. I looked…
FWIW you can do:
heroku run bash
They helped me by setting up a Capistrano script for me that I run alongside my Heroku pushes. They set up the entire stack according to a specification I talked them through. And they helped me write a script to keep my backup DB in line with my production DB (Heroku Postgres). It's not nearly as quick as provisioning a Heroku app yourself, but if you can spare the week it took to get all that put together with just a little hands-on work, it's not bad.
Overall good experience, good support, if a little slow to respond, but I think mainly because they had one engineer working my case for the entire process, who I'm sure was also working with other customers. But having that 1:1 relationship is good, too. Tradeoffs.