Hey Liam, So I'm potentially a little biased given I used to work at Heroku, but I've also seen this type of analysis before so I thought it worth digging into just in case. The salient bits are:
* Heroku: 2 basic 512mb dynos, + non hobby postgres + ssl end point is $US > 62/mo. > * AWS: Assuming I can figure out X > The devil is in the detail :) I've heard lots of people say "Heroku is too expensive" over the years and it's true, but probably only in a single digit percentage of cases. How long do you think it'll take you to figure out Elastic Beanstalk? And what's your hourly rate? It'd have to be incredibly low (infeasibly so in the Australian market) to justify doing any of this yourself. It's not so much a question of whether this particular project is making any money, but the effort you'll expend maintaining this stuff is time and energy you can spend doing other revenue generating activities. The addendum to this Heroku criticism is it gets really expensive when you start using add-ons. The reality is that you're actually making your infrastructure a multiple or order of magnitude more expensive to operate. So if you've got redis + postgres + elasticsearch + your app it's now at least 4 different things you need to know how to install, how to operate it, how to keep it performant at a "production" level, how to monitor it, how to detect failures or outages, and how to ensure you can recover it quickly. It will get more expensive, but hopefully are a lower rate than the opportunity cost should you to do all this stuff yourself. Heroku is by no means a silver-bullet nor a no-brainer that everyone should use for every project, and I have no horse in this race any more. But I don't think the criticism of it in this instance is fair for the sake of $20/mo. And if you really need to save $20/mo you can get rid of SSL endpoint and use the https://yourappname.herokuapp.com/ domain you get for free. If that doesn't sit comfortably for branding or other reasons I suspect the site is worth $20/mo to you. FWIW the thing that keeps me most tightly bound to Heroku is Heroku Postgres. Sure AWS has Postgres RDS now, but https://dataclips.heroku.com is such a useful (and under appreciated) tool for sharing information that I can't imagine not having it now. And more recently https://addons.heroku.com/expeditedssl because certificate registration and maintenance has always been a pain and something I'm glad to never have to worry about again. If I move to another provider this level of convenience isn't even an option. Whereas I can always run bits of my own infrastructure in AWS or DigitalOcean and use if from Heroku should I need to. Best, G > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby or Rails Oceania" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rails-oceania. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
