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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

#21

Post by nphase »

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…

You have to debit the cost of Heroku's downtime from the cost of building your own infrastructure.

That's silly, and also not how it works, at all. You're paying PaaS/IaaS companies so that it's their headache, not yours. Once it becomes your headache, they are no longer doing their job, and you are no longer receiving value for which you are paying for. You don't debit the cost of their downtime from the cost i would've built your infrastructure, you debit the cost of their downtime from your business' revenue and reputation.

Whether or not you could do it better yourself does not excuse the downtime one bit.

Re: Heroku is down for the third time today

#22

Post by mike-cardwell »

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…

Eggs, basket, etc.

Re: Heroku is down for the third time today

#24

Post by Goosey »

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…

Are there any companies that provide 'server host failure' insurance for instances like this? It seems like a possible opportunity.

Re: Heroku is down for the third time today

#25

Post by Goosey »

absconditus wrote: post #9
snprbob86 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well technically, I was informed of it. I got email alerts and stuff, but I was busy doing other things, so I didn't read them. Users surely noticed, but Heroku definitely noticed before my users did. They're quietly working on a solution and I can quietly go about my day. If my users start complaining, I'll have time to talk to them; time I wouldn't have if I was neck deep in log spew. Having run apps on my own serv…

Having experts be responsible for dealing with problems is not unique to "cloud computing".

Not unique to it, but it is implicit in it. This matters. If you are at the size where you can't have a dedicated staff monitoring your uptime 24/7 than you are at the size where a cloud solution is going to be more responsive than what you can afford.

Re: Heroku is down for the third time today

#26

Post by sync »

iampims wrote: post #15
biaxident wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It will. Currently in private beta, heroku will render an iframe pointed to an arbitrary url hosted externally (say, on S3.)

Re: Heroku is down for the third time today

#27

Post by aneth »

I haven't seen an explanation for this, but I could be related to ec2 issues today. I'm a heroku user. Downtime with any host always seems to happen with bad timing, during a daily client call today. However I'm not concerned about heroku - yet... I think they have less downtime than I would have doing it myself.

Re: Heroku is down for the third time today

#28

Post by Timothee »

vegashacker wrote: post #6

It just occurred to me that you know you've made some pretty serious traction as a startup when HN posts about your company no longer have something like "(YC W08)" appended to the end.

Thanks for pointing that out, because I had completely forgotten that this was the case. (I actually can't remember at all, but I figure that I knew that from when they came out)

They did go a long way in a short period of time. Winter 2008 feels so close.

Re: Heroku is down for the third time today

#29

Post by jimbokun »

nphase wrote: post #21
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…

You have to debit the cost of Heroku's downtime from the cost of building your own infrastructure. That's silly, and also not how it works, at all. You're paying PaaS/IaaS companies so that it's their headache, not yours. Once it becomes your headache, they are no longer doing their job, and you are no longer receiving value for which you are paying for. You don't debit the cost of their downtime from the cost i woul…

Excusing or not excusing are irrelevant.

If you stop using Heroku and manage your own infrastructure, you need to take all relevant costs into account.

Of course, finding an alternative provider of the same (or similar) services is also an option.

Re: Heroku is down for the third time today

#30

Post by citricsquid »

gfunk911 wrote: post #19

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…

Move to vps.net for a few weeks, then move back to Heroku, by that time he'll be counting uptime not downtime!
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