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Ask HN: Heroku or Not?

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Re: Ask HN: Heroku or Not?

#41

Post by swombat »

angilly wrote: post #6

Trust me, Heroku is not costly compared to setting up a server: $ git push master heroku is a lot cheaper then: Setup a machine. Then setup mysql, nginx, REE 1.8.6, or did you go with MRI 1.9.1? You're not gonna launch on Rails3 right? Because then you can't do 1.9.1, you have to go to 1.9.2. And you know how to setup nginx to pipe requests through to a Rails app. Are you going with Passenger or Unicorn? Oh make sure…

Setting up your own server gives you full flexibility as to your application architecture/tech stack. Want to go with Redis? Tokyo Cabinet? MogileFS? S3? A pile of files in a zillion small directories? something else? Your choice.

If your startup has any challenging technical elements, I think having 100% full control over your app architecture is quite important. You can live without it, but it's a potentially costly trade-off.

Re: Ask HN: Heroku or Not?

#42

Post by michaelhalligan »

cletus wrote: post #32
moe wrote: post #12

Wow, lots of heroku praise here. Let's put that a bit into perspective. Heroku is indeed great for starting out when you can get away with the free plan or need only a small number of dynos and ideally none of their addons. Heroku can be a beautiful launchpad during the bootstrap phase. Once your heroku bill approaches about ~$500/month you should start looking elsewhere, though. Their pricing for larger deployments…

Memory pricing for all shared/VPS hosting is simply bizarre. RAM is dirt cheap. I don't get it. It's almost like they all got together and decided to gouge on the one thing people need. It's this one factor alone that seems to make dedicated/colocation services a better option at about the point you mention.

So they gouge on the RAM but they generally give everything else at a very respectable price? Sounds reasonable to me. It's not too shocking actually .. If you're renting a $99/month server with 512MB of memory and 80gb of disk space, you're losing money on it unless it's an old, already amortized server. That RAM upsell might become all of the profit of that server.. also, limited ram and disk space means you can do less with your server, like use less power or less bandwidth.

Re: Ask HN: Heroku or Not?

#43

Post by moe »

cletus wrote: post #32
moe wrote: post #12

Wow, lots of heroku praise here. Let's put that a bit into perspective. Heroku is indeed great for starting out when you can get away with the free plan or need only a small number of dynos and ideally none of their addons. Heroku can be a beautiful launchpad during the bootstrap phase. Once your heroku bill approaches about ~$500/month you should start looking elsewhere, though. Their pricing for larger deployments…

Memory pricing for all shared/VPS hosting is simply bizarre. RAM is dirt cheap. I don't get it. It's almost like they all got together and decided to gouge on the one thing people need. It's this one factor alone that seems to make dedicated/colocation services a better option at about the point you mention.

Memory pricing for all shared/VPS hosting is simply bizarre.

Not really. DIMM modules are fairly cheap but DIMM slots are not. Your average mid-range server can, in theory, be maxed out to 192G or even 256G RAM. But only if you use 8G or even 16G DIMMs - and those are still hideously expensive.

The most cost efficient configuration usually gravitates around 64G (16x 4G) nowadays, rarely higher.

So, when you factor in the cost overhead per server (rackspace, power/cooling, network infrastructure, maintenance) then it's not hard to understand why RAM is the most expensive ressource in the cloud.

Re: Ask HN: Heroku or Not?

#44

Post by terrellm »

moe wrote: post #12

Wow, lots of heroku praise here. Let's put that a bit into perspective. Heroku is indeed great for starting out when you can get away with the free plan or need only a small number of dynos and ideally none of their addons. Heroku can be a beautiful launchpad during the bootstrap phase. Once your heroku bill approaches about ~$500/month you should start looking elsewhere, though. Their pricing for larger deployments…

I agree - it's great to get started and get traction with an app but can become costly after a certain point. When I got to a point of needing several dynos, I went to Engine Yard which like Heroku takes care of all of the Amazon EC2 configuration.

Also, with deploy hooks at EY, I have command line deployment similar to Heroku's "git push heroku master" by using a specific command in your commit message 'git commit -am "[deploy myapp_production]" and then 'git push'.

Re: Ask HN: Heroku or Not?

#45

Post by atldev »

eddie_catflap wrote: post #38
atldev wrote: post #31

I recently launched a small project ( http://statusdashboard.com ) with the goal of learning RoR and was blown away by the community and infrastructure (particularly Heroku). 3 weeks from watching the first blog railscast to a fucntioning site (with SSL, recurring billing, monitoring, etc.). I've also setup a VPS and started learning how to host myself (I think it is always better to understand how the magic happens)…

Hi - as an aside - I think it would be worth adding some 'tour' pages to your status dashboard site. I like the design but I'm not sure how the site works etc.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll be working on that this weekend. I'm thinking of including a short video as well.

Re: Ask HN: Heroku or Not?

#46

Post by amock »

jacquesm wrote: post #29

Heroku is probably really great as long as you are small. Once you get serious you can host much cheaper on your own machines, but there will be additional (hidden) costs to factor in because you'll be spending more time on doing all the stuff that Heroku does for you. That's their added value, super easy deployment and keeping your stuff up and running. Cost wise it is fine as long as you're small enough to not noti…

Once you get big enough you might be able to negotiate with Heroku for a better deal. They might not be willing to give you au better deal, but if you're already there you might as well try before going through the expense of moving somewhere else.

Re: Ask HN: Heroku or Not?

#47

Post by angilly »

swombat wrote: post #41
angilly wrote: post #6

Trust me, Heroku is not costly compared to setting up a server: $ git push master heroku is a lot cheaper then: Setup a machine. Then setup mysql, nginx, REE 1.8.6, or did you go with MRI 1.9.1? You're not gonna launch on Rails3 right? Because then you can't do 1.9.1, you have to go to 1.9.2. And you know how to setup nginx to pipe requests through to a Rails app. Are you going with Passenger or Unicorn? Oh make sure…

Setting up your own server gives you full flexibility as to your application architecture/tech stack. Want to go with Redis? Tokyo Cabinet? MogileFS? S3? A pile of files in a zillion small directories? something else? Your choice. If your startup has any challenging technical elements, I think having 100% full control over your app architecture is quite important. You can live without it, but it's a potentially costl…

FWIW, judging by "My team does not have experience in setting up a server" I doubt OP is going to be playing with any of that stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Heroku or Not?

#48

Post by tropin »

slashclee wrote: post #33
dschobel wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could write a similarly disingenuous how-to on using linux and vi to write c vs writing visual basic on my HP desktop from costco. Is there a learning curve to mastering these things? Of course. But there is a huge reward in learning them. Otherwise, woe be unto you the first time you want to do something heroku does not allow (or gets acquired, or folds up, etc etc etc).

Those aren't the same thing at all. You can't write C in visual basic. The guy you were responding to was comparing what it would take to get your application working with Heroku vs. what it would take to set up your own server providing some of the same services that Heroku does. If you were trying to set up a similar question, it'd have to be more like: "Should I use gcc or should I write my own C compiler?" Clearl…

Visual Basic is Turing-complete, so you can write C with it.

Re: Ask HN: Heroku or Not?

#49

Post by aaronbrethorst »

jesselamb wrote: post #34
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #9

I am totally in favor of Heroku. Like other folks have pointed out, it's far cheaper (at least at first) to scale up on Heroku than to hire an ops person. I think that outgrowing Heroku, or finding that your real costs would be lower by going elsewhere or buying hardware, is a good problem to have. I would much rather spend my time building my product than dealing with all of the fiddly bits of managing web servers,…

I love Doppler. Thanks for it! :)

Glad you like it! Hit me up at aaron@structlab.com if you have any feature requests or bugs to report. I have v1.1 in the pipeline right now, and would like to incorporate a couple more user-suggested changes before I submit to Apple if possible.

Re: Ask HN: Heroku or Not?

#50

Post by aaronblohowiak »

joe-mccann wrote: post #7

Heroku is awesome for ruby development. If you're attempting node.js development, they do have a private beta (which I've tested), but is somewhat limited as I believe it uses an NGINX proxy so doing something like websockets with node.js (currently on Heroku) is not possible. git push master heroku is reason enough to give it a shot. Joyent may be another option...

joyent is nice and their support is tops
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