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Ask HN: Heroku or Not?

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Re: Ask HN: Heroku or Not?

#51

Post by swombat »

angilly wrote: post #47
swombat wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Granted, but if your team doesn't have experience setting up a server, I question whether they have the required skills to run a startup's technology. A startup CTO should be able to set up a server reasonably quickly, effectively, and securely...

Re: Ask HN: Heroku or Not?

#52

Post by lulin »

tropin wrote: post #48
slashclee wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So is brainfuck.

Re: Ask HN: Heroku or Not?

#53

Post by audyyy »

tropin wrote: post #48
slashclee wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

maybe I will!

Re: Ask HN: Heroku or Not?

#54

Post by bmelton »

swombat wrote: post #40
thibaut_barrere wrote: post #37

Here's my take: -> if time is more precious than money, go with Heroku. -> if money is more precious than time, go with Linode/SliceHost etc. You can change your mind later on (depending on scale increase cash etc), or even mix-and-match (eg: your workers on Linode, your front-ends on Heroku). Last point: some software (eg: sphinx) are not available on Heroku, and some others (eg: websolr) are quite costly compared t…

If money is more precious than time but you have a need for reasonably beefy servers, go with Hetzner: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr...

Maybe a dumb question, but my brief scan over there didn't see US Dollars or anything in American English. Do they have a US website, location or affiliate?

Re: Ask HN: Heroku or Not?

#55

Post by logandk »

Although I love Heroku, and it really is a great platform, I find that, for my startup and personal projects, the costs hold me back from doing some things.

Say I need to run a simple background job, that would be $36/month - almost 2 linodes. And with the excellent articles on http://articles.slicehost.com, I find that setting up a vps takes no more than a few hours. Plus, it's a lot of fun and a good learning experience!

I don't see how Heroku could do it much cheaper though, when you look at the pricing of Amazon EC2 instances which their platform runs on.

Re: Ask HN: Heroku or Not?

#56

Post by boltofblue »

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…

Heroku doesn't stop you using Mongo, Redis or S3. They actually promote these things.

Re: Ask HN: Heroku or Not?

#57

Post by phylae »

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…

Memcached is not run (or priced by) Heroku. That is an addon provided by a 3rd party (http://www.northscale.com/).

In addition, there is absolutely nothing stopping you from running your own, separate memcached server and pointing your Heroku app there. If you host it on EC2, then you should have very low latency to Heroku.

Heroku is obviously not perfect, but this particular criticism is not valid. That said, you can point this criticism at Northscale.

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