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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

#51

Post by patio11 »

Goosey wrote: post #24
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.

The E&O insurance I looked into getting when I moved into consulting would have covered it -- "lost sales" resulting from a "hardware or software malfunction." I assume if you start making recurring claims on that the insurance company will reevaluate whether they want to continue doing business with you, though.

Re: Heroku is down for the third time today

#52

Post by ahoyhere »

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…

We've been running on Slicehost for almost 2 years and I believe we've had two outages, one of which wasn't a real outage but a backbone provider went kaplooey in Europe. That can't really be helped.

Heroku, on the other hand, feels like it's up and down more than... something that goes up and down a lot. A friend of mine hosts his blog there and he launched a small product today and he kept sending his customers to an error page, because Heroku was up, down, up down, up down.

If it's a misconfiguration of your own, you can get it fixed. But if your hosting provider has an unsound business, you can't fix that except by leaving.

Re: Heroku is down for the third time today

#53

Post by gvb »

awt wrote: post #41
davidamcclain wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Care to share what you're doing/what the heck that means?

http://motodiaryapp.com -- of course if Heroku is down and it's not already cached for you it won't load. This is the technology the site uses to allow offline access: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...

That is really awesome. I just got back from playing with it between Chrome on an old 800MHz P-III (very usable) and an Android (Nexus One). On the Nexus, I went off-line (airplane mode), edited, and then went back on-line. MAGIC! My edits showed up in my Chrome browser on the desktop.

My use case is that I want to use Google Docs (or equivalent) to keep notes while on-line and off-line. MotoDiary ain't quite there yet, but it has the hard part (IMHO), the on-line/off-line syncing. What is rough is text size and fixed(?) edit box size on the Android. Also (obviously), it is diary-oriented (single entry per day) rather than supporting multiple documents.

Google Docs are totally uneditable (?WTF!) on Android, never mind doing it off-line and syncing.

There are some Apps that work better, such as GDocs. GDocs has been a mixed bag, it allows me to edit off-line and sync docs, but has been iffy in terms of success rate. It definitely isn't as smooth as my brief experience with MotoDiary.

Re: Heroku is down for the third time today

#54

Post by whirlycott1 »

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…

Uh... 99.7% is ridiculously bad if you're doing anything that matters.

Re: Heroku is down for the third time today

#55

Post by kes »

whirlycott1 wrote: post #54
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…

Uh... 99.7% is ridiculously bad if you're doing anything that matters.

I agree with you, but only in theory. I can't think of one thing that runs 100% non-stop.

Even in places like medicine or finance or security. Stuff breaks, things fail. It's sad, but the reality is there.

Re: Heroku is down for the third time today

#56

Post by invisible »

kes wrote: post #55
whirlycott1 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh... 99.7% is ridiculously bad if you're doing anything that matters.

I agree with you, but only in theory. I can't think of one thing that runs 100% non-stop. Even in places like medicine or finance or security. Stuff breaks, things fail. It's sad, but the reality is there.

Part of my job is network administration of a small (~50 server) colo/hosting service. It's unacceptable for us to be down for even 30 minutes (from our perspective and our clients). We maybe top out at 5 hours of downtime a year (during a bad year) and most of that (unfortunately) is upstream from us.

Re: Heroku is down for the third time today

#57

Post by itsnotvalid »

It's sooner or later for most people to realize that, it is not that safe to rely on a specific deployment system that is not directly controllable. It could be dangerous to use a full stack that cannot easily be replaced without a decent amount of efforts.

Initial laziness now adds up.

Re: Heroku is down for the third time today

#58

Post by jackowayed »

kes wrote: post #55
whirlycott1 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh... 99.7% is ridiculously bad if you're doing anything that matters.

I agree with you, but only in theory. I can't think of one thing that runs 100% non-stop. Even in places like medicine or finance or security. Stuff breaks, things fail. It's sad, but the reality is there.

Of course nothing will have 100.0 (repeating)% uptime. But 99.7% uptime means it can be down for over 2 hours every month. Anything less than 99.9% uptime (which means 3x less allowed downtime--a big difference) is probably unacceptable, and if downtime costs you serious money, you're going to want more decimal places.

Re: Heroku is down for the third time today

#59

Post by jemfinch »

jimbokun wrote: post #29
nphase wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't it commonly recognized that it's cheaper to run your own hardware than to pay a cloud provider? It just requires more capital outlay and maintenance.
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