Item — HN Reader

Heroku is great, no doubt about that. My only issue is the 'guilt factor': almost all of my use of Heroku has been for free (my cookingspace.com web site that I use to monitor my diet because I take blood thinners; test deploying prototypes; used it to write 3 articles about Heroku for DevX).

I have had poor results getting customers to use Heroku. I tried twice, and both times the extra cost over running your own EC2 instances convinced my customers to eventually spend much more money having me set up custom infrastructure - not a good decision unless you expect to have a very high volume site (I hope they are not reading this :-)

1 comments

Costs that are represented in obvious dollar amounts with alternatives that have lower obvious dollar amounts tend to go over poorly with clients.

The nebulous cost of more developer and admin time is something they can carefully ignore in their cost calculations.

I agree. Also, I suspect that if a deployed app is rarely accessed, then there is some spin up time to load a slug. Both customers noticed this effect that the first page load usually seemed slow to them. Same thing on AppEngine (a 'loading request' can take a while).

Bottom line is that people dream that their web app will attract millions of users, and they want to plan for outstanding success. While I am sure that Heroku must have customers with large user bases, the sweet spot seems to be for moderately sized web portals that you sometimes need to scale up on demand.

That would be a despicable thing for Heroku to do: you're paying them for capacity by the dyno-hour, but they don't keep all of them resident while they're paid for?

App Engine is the opposite: you're paying for the usage, so they spin up/down as much capacity as necessary to satisfy the volume you're willing to pay for.

You might be right that Heroku always keeps all of your dynos "spinning." If they do spin them down for the two less expensive shared cluster options, that seems OK, at least for my understanding of their service options. My customers used (for a while) the cheaper shared cluster options.

If you are paying more for the dedicated cluster options, then I agree with you that they should not be spun down.

Certainly, it is OK for them to spin down the free option dynos if they don't get HTTP requests for some reasonable time period.

That's exactly what they do: spin down inactive free app. Anything which is paid for will never be spun down