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Heroku is down for the third time today

status.heroku.com

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Re: Heroku is down for the third time today

#11

Post by ayb »

SpikeGronim wrote: post #7
ayb wrote: post #3

I use Heroku for subscription software services, online retail stores, and phone ordering system for our staff. Right now all of our sites are failing with 503 errors. Our store is down and when one of our employees went to take a phone order they got a "Welcome to your new app" message. I've been a big evangelist of Heroku since we migrated over last year, but I'm getting deeply concerned about the elevated error ra…

My question to you is, could you do better and how much would it cost? If you didn't use Heroku or another cloud provider you would pay a lot more up front to get your applications running. When things go wrong you would have to fix it, which means paying technical staff to be on call. Since you and your company are likely experts in your domain and not in infrastructure then any infrastructure that you built would l…

We're actively sending pay per click traffic to our online store and it's very easy to spend hundreds of dollars. When our traffic converts it's great but it pains me to think I could be sending traffic to a Heroku 503 error page and have zero control over it.

So, "could we do better"? I'm not sure. I'm trying to figure that out. It certainly would not be as easy to use as Heroku or easy to deploy. But at a minimum I need to get some other host option set that we can switch over to.

Re: Heroku is down for the third time today

#12

Post by qeorge »

ayb wrote: post #3

I use Heroku for subscription software services, online retail stores, and phone ordering system for our staff. Right now all of our sites are failing with 503 errors. Our store is down and when one of our employees went to take a phone order they got a "Welcome to your new app" message. I've been a big evangelist of Heroku since we migrated over last year, but I'm getting deeply concerned about the elevated error ra…

Does Heroku have an SLA? (I could not find it)

At some point they're exposing themselves to serious risk. Rackspace had to pay out ~$3MM (in free service credits) after an outage in 2009:

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/070609-rackspace-outag...

Re: Heroku is down for the third time today

#13

Post by [deleted] »

qeorge wrote: post #12
ayb wrote: post #3

I use Heroku for subscription software services, online retail stores, and phone ordering system for our staff. Right now all of our sites are failing with 503 errors. Our store is down and when one of our employees went to take a phone order they got a "Welcome to your new app" message. I've been a big evangelist of Heroku since we migrated over last year, but I'm getting deeply concerned about the elevated error ra…

Does Heroku have an SLA? (I could not find it) At some point they're exposing themselves to serious risk. Rackspace had to pay out ~$3MM (in free service credits) after an outage in 2009: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/070609-rackspace-outag...

[deleted]

Re: Heroku is down for the third time today

#14

Post by ayb »

qeorge wrote: post #12
ayb wrote: post #3

I use Heroku for subscription software services, online retail stores, and phone ordering system for our staff. Right now all of our sites are failing with 503 errors. Our store is down and when one of our employees went to take a phone order they got a "Welcome to your new app" message. I've been a big evangelist of Heroku since we migrated over last year, but I'm getting deeply concerned about the elevated error ra…

Does Heroku have an SLA? (I could not find it) At some point they're exposing themselves to serious risk. Rackspace had to pay out ~$3MM (in free service credits) after an outage in 2009: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/070609-rackspace-outag...

As far as I know there is no SLA.

However I really think they ought to consider it.

They're at an unusual juncture for a YC-based company in that companies such as ours are relying on them. When our apps go down, we lose money.

I love the guys at Heroku - they have been incredibly helpful over the past year - but I don't think they get the sense of urgency we feel in our stomachs when we realize our apps are down.

Re: Heroku is down for the third time today

#15

Post by iampims »

biaxident wrote: post #8
ayb wrote: post #3

I use Heroku for subscription software services, online retail stores, and phone ordering system for our staff. Right now all of our sites are failing with 503 errors. Our store is down and when one of our employees went to take a phone order they got a "Welcome to your new app" message. I've been a big evangelist of Heroku since we migrated over last year, but I'm getting deeply concerned about the elevated error ra…

I've currently got a few small apps on Heroku and am considering moving some larger ones over. But the "Heroku | Welcome to your new app!" is very worrying. Custom error pages for these kinds of errors would be very useful.

It took Google App Engine two years to add the option to specify a custom error page for server errors and over quota errors. Hopefully that'll come soon for Heroku as well…

Re: Heroku is down for the third time today

#16

Post by bl4k »

ayb wrote: post #11
SpikeGronim wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My question to you is, could you do better and how much would it cost? If you didn't use Heroku or another cloud provider you would pay a lot more up front to get your applications running. When things go wrong you would have to fix it, which means paying technical staff to be on call. Since you and your company are likely experts in your domain and not in infrastructure then any infrastructure that you built would l…

We're actively sending pay per click traffic to our online store and it's very easy to spend hundreds of dollars. When our traffic converts it's great but it pains me to think I could be sending traffic to a Heroku 503 error page and have zero control over it. So, "could we do better"? I'm not sure. I'm trying to figure that out. It certainly would not be as easy to use as Heroku or easy to deploy. But at a minimum I…

Is there a service that will switch off adwords campaigns if your site is down or in maintenance mode? If not, there should be.

Re: Heroku is down for the third time today

#18

Post by ayb »

bl4k wrote: post #16
ayb wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're actively sending pay per click traffic to our online store and it's very easy to spend hundreds of dollars. When our traffic converts it's great but it pains me to think I could be sending traffic to a Heroku 503 error page and have zero control over it. So, "could we do better"? I'm not sure. I'm trying to figure that out. It certainly would not be as easy to use as Heroku or easy to deploy. But at a minimum I…

Is there a service that will switch off adwords campaigns if your site is down or in maintenance mode? If not, there should be.

Thought about writing an app to do that. Unfortunately I would not be able to host it on Heroku. :-)

Re: Heroku is down for the third time today

#19

Post by gfunk911 »

It all depends on what the SLA says, but hypothetically, if they are down for 24 hours a year, that's 99.7% uptime, which isn't terrible.

Heroku had a 1-2 hour outage the week after we switched an app there last year. My boss was freaking out, cursing about how they were unreliable, etc, neglecting the following:

1. The timing was unfortunate, but that was the first outage in months.

2. We had had multiple outages on our Rackspace box that were our own fault, due to bad server management.

In the long term you're likely better on Heroku, for small companies at least.

Re: Heroku is down for the third time today

#20

Post by tedunangst »

SpikeGronim wrote: post #7
ayb wrote: post #3

I use Heroku for subscription software services, online retail stores, and phone ordering system for our staff. Right now all of our sites are failing with 503 errors. Our store is down and when one of our employees went to take a phone order they got a "Welcome to your new app" message. I've been a big evangelist of Heroku since we migrated over last year, but I'm getting deeply concerned about the elevated error ra…

My question to you is, could you do better and how much would it cost? If you didn't use Heroku or another cloud provider you would pay a lot more up front to get your applications running. When things go wrong you would have to fix it, which means paying technical staff to be on call. Since you and your company are likely experts in your domain and not in infrastructure then any infrastructure that you built would l…

If you run your own site and things go wrong, you (hopefully) know what you did. When Heroku (or AWS, or anyone) makes a change, they don't consult every customer to find out if now is a good time to go down.
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