Hi...My team does not have experience in setting up a server. I mean a production server. We are thinking about using heroku, because it removes the system admin. Heroku is costly compared to the setting up a server. So can you guys please give your opinion about using heroku or not?
Thanks :)
Ask HN: Heroku or Not?
1–10 of 57 posts
Re: Ask HN: Heroku or Not?
#2Heroku is great for site that might work out and might not. The initial cost is zero, but you can scale out as needed. Hopefully youve structured your business properly so that herokus cost is a small percentage of revenue.
Re: Ask HN: Heroku or Not?
#3definitely use heroku if you are using a ruby framework. we've had a much better experience than with managing our own EC2 server or using RightScale
Re: Ask HN: Heroku or Not?
#4Heroku is a great way to get your app up and out there quickly. Get in front of users and then iterate on your product. The perceived cost of Heroku won't turn out to be an issue until you've scaled out to many dynos.
Don't fret optimizing your hosting bill until it gets large enough to be an issue!
Re: Ask HN: Heroku or Not?
#5Heroku is awesome. Not only does it work well, it also encourages best practices.
Re: Ask HN: Heroku or Not?
#6Trust 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 to bring up another machine to act as a MySQL slave. You know how to do that right? And you're dumping your DB to disk and backing up to S3 regularly right. Just write a simple script/cron job to handle that. And when you setup your machines you made sure to setup 2 so that if one goes down, the other will still be around, and you setup a load balancer that will realize when one of those machines goes down right?
etc.... :)
Re: Ask HN: Heroku or Not?
#7Heroku 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...
Re: Ask HN: Heroku or Not?
#8Use Heroku. The cost of acquiring or hiring the sysadmin knowledge is going to far exceed just using Heroku. This includes Heroku's main competitor, Engineyard.
EY has its upsides (and downsides), but definitely requires more sysadmin experience.
Re: Ask HN: Heroku or Not?
#9I 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, databases, full text search setup, security, patching, etc.
If need arises, migrating off Heroku in the future shouldn't be too challenging.
Also, if you do choose to try out Heroku, pick up my iPhone/iPad app for managing your Heroku applications (http://dopplerapp.com). Good luck!
Re: Ask HN: Heroku or Not?
#10I like Heroku, but if you want your own server (so you don't have to pay for outgoing email or cron jobs or DelayedJob), you can set up an Ubuntu 8.10 server super easily with Moonshine. I gave a talk about it at SD Ruby a while back.
http://jarinheit.posterous.com/a-talk-i-gave-at-sd-ruby-depl...