How Art.sy survived a NYTimes.com homepage launch with Heroku + MongoHQ
success.heroku.com
How Art.sy survived a NYTimes.com homepage launch with Heroku + MongoHQ
1–10 of 39 posts
Re: How Art.sy survived a NYTimes.com homepage launch with Heroku + MongoHQ
#2I'd love to deploy on Heroku, but it's so dramatically more expensive than aws. For a startup, is it really worth that additional cost?
Re: How Art.sy survived a NYTimes.com homepage launch with Heroku + MongoHQ
#3I'd read this with a grain of salt. I remember looking at art.sy via the NYTimes link and thinking the site was terribly slow. I still find it moderately slow. I am not sure they really need mixpanel, google analytics, and kissmetrics, on every click and the api calls should take less than the 1-4 seconds I am seeing.
Re: How Art.sy survived a NYTimes.com homepage launch with Heroku + MongoHQ
#4I'd love to deploy on Heroku, but it's so dramatically more expensive than aws. For a startup, is it really worth that additional cost?
Heroku is really just AWS with convenience, isn't it? I'm not sure what else they do - but I guess that "convenience" is worth it for some.
Re: How Art.sy survived a NYTimes.com homepage launch with Heroku + MongoHQ
#5I'd read this with a grain of salt. I remember looking at art.sy via the NYTimes link and thinking the site was terribly slow. I still find it moderately slow. I am not sure they really need mixpanel, google analytics, and kissmetrics, on every click and the api calls should take less than the 1-4 seconds I am seeing.
dblock from Art.sy here. The analytics comment is totally fair - we spent a lot of time looking at all kinds of stats as we keep experimenting and it needs to be trimmed down to 1 (or none :)).
Our average API response is 380ms. It's about 20x too long as far as I am concerned. It's not Heroku's fault to be fair, there's a mix of Ruby code, database queries and some not so easy to optimize math in some cases. It's definitely work in progress.
Re: How Art.sy survived a NYTimes.com homepage launch with Heroku + MongoHQ
#6I'd love to deploy on Heroku, but it's so dramatically more expensive than aws. For a startup, is it really worth that additional cost?
Heroku is really just AWS with convenience, isn't it? I'm not sure what else they do - but I guess that "convenience" is worth it for some.
The convenience is totally worth it for prototypes and very early stage startups. The less work I do on a system level is more time I can spend on my startup.
Once you move past that, because your app is well structured you can easily deploy on your own hardware.
Re: How Art.sy survived a NYTimes.com homepage launch with Heroku + MongoHQ
#7I'd love to deploy on Heroku, but it's so dramatically more expensive than aws. For a startup, is it really worth that additional cost?
I think it's totally worth it. Right now it still costs us less than a developer to run on Heroku and not that long ago we were 3 of those devs. I think having our front-ends on EC2 along with setting up memcached/mongo/nginx/etc ourselves is a much higher upfront cost.
Then there're traffic spikes. Pretty hard to deploy to bare metal or EC2 instantly without building your own Heroku-like system.
Re: How Art.sy survived a NYTimes.com homepage launch with Heroku + MongoHQ
#8I'd love to deploy on Heroku, but it's so dramatically more expensive than aws. For a startup, is it really worth that additional cost?
Heroku is really just AWS with convenience, isn't it? I'm not sure what else they do - but I guess that "convenience" is worth it for some.
Is it possible to launch using just a single dyno and heavy caching/optimization?
Re: How Art.sy survived a NYTimes.com homepage launch with Heroku + MongoHQ
#9I'd love to deploy on Heroku, but it's so dramatically more expensive than aws. For a startup, is it really worth that additional cost?
I use heroku for prototyping, which it is great for. I would not use it for larger projects in production (disclaimer: while also being a developer, I'm the company syadmin). If we measure downtime, heroku had much more downtime, than the servers we have internally - and I find heroku extremely slow compared to what I can deliver with basic hardware. Their database offerings are awesome, though.
Re: How Art.sy survived a NYTimes.com homepage launch with Heroku + MongoHQ
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heroku is really just AWS with convenience, isn't it? I'm not sure what else they do - but I guess that "convenience" is worth it for some.
Is it possible to launch using just a single dyno and heavy caching/optimization?
Depending on what you need to do to show off the product, absolutely. A static landing page should withstand just about anything you throw at it.