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Heroku is down

heroku.com

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Re: Heroku is down

#41

Post by grandalf »

Heroku is a great platform and has come a really long way -- but it could really use some competition. Some of the main issues that would be resolved quickly with competition are:

- it would be possible to have the non-DB part of your heroku app be spread across multiple availability zones.

- worker pricing would be much lower or based on actual CPU cycles used.

- add-on providers would be vetted more thoroughly before getting a spot in the add-on store.

- they'd reopen the #heroku irc channel for informal support

Re: Heroku is down

#43

Post by soulclap »

switz wrote: post #18

If status.heroku goes down due to 500 errors (overloading) use https://status-old.heroku.com/

It seems like they are quick and post a lot of updates on this status page each time when something's wrong. (I am not using Heroku but had the 'joy' of trying to run a site on Dreamhost for a while, so I have seen the worst.)

Re: Heroku is down

#44

Post by mcs »

bitsweet wrote: post #30

What would really help in these situations is a failover to our maintenance pages or some other static page we could provide instead of showing the Heroku "Application Error". This is probably harder then it seems, especially when the outage is related to their routing infrastructure.

Well, there is an option to have error pages on your heroku domains, but that is probably dependent on at least a minimum level of the routing layer working.

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/error-pages

Re: Heroku is down

#47

Post by garindra »

philip1209 wrote: post #39
g0atbutt wrote: post #34

As a newbie, I've really enjoyed deploying on Heroku. However these outages really terrify me. Is there an easy way to host a redundant version of your app outside of Heroku?

If you use Cloudflare it will serve a static version of the site until it is back online.

I always use Cloudflare in front of Heroku; mainly because of that and the cheap & simple SSL set-up that they have.

Re: Heroku is down

#48

Post by wheels »

kennystone wrote: post #37
chao- wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. We are finally scaling from "small scale production" to having actual customers we want to take care of. Worse, we began a huge marketing push this week and had been seeing promising results. Now we'll probably miss a boatload of potential customers. Heroku had been a joy to work with until now. I ask of you all (as most of you are far more experienced in these matters than I), what is the traditional practic…

Heroku is really good. You will probably have more downtime than them unless you hire a whole team of operations and admins and pay a lot of money for hosting. It may also take a while to build out the deployment and development tools they have.

Honestly, that's pious bullshit. It's the thing people keep saying every time Heroku gets mentioned is that it'd do better than you would yourself for availability, but you'd have to be borderline incompetent to have as much downtime with a more traditional VPS / hardware hosting to match the combined Heroku / AWS downtime.

We moved all but one of our Rails apps off of Heroku precisely because of the frequent downtime -- or, rather, that was the last straw; there were other issues, notably the difficulty in debugging production issues, that had us already debating such. Heroku has gotten somewhat better, but it's still down far more than anything else that we use. (And we have services spread across Linode, Rackspace, AWS and the mentioned one app on Heroku.)

You'll have better uptime in most cases with a standard nginx / passenger setup on a $20 VPS than you will with Heroku.

Re: Heroku is down

#49

Post by ricardobeat »

grandalf wrote: post #41

Heroku is a great platform and has come a really long way -- but it could really use some competition. Some of the main issues that would be resolved quickly with competition are: - it would be possible to have the non-DB part of your heroku app be spread across multiple availability zones. - worker pricing would be much lower or based on actual CPU cycles used. - add-on providers would be vetted more thoroughly befo…

you mean like AWS, EngineYard, appfog, dotCloud?
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