4 ms·

Heroku for Facebook Developers

36 points by ph0rque 16y ago

onewland 16y ago
I haven't had to manage a site at that traffic level before, but is there really a use case where you're immediately going from no managed hosting to needing $1500/month in managed hosting? I don't doubt these are the resources necessary for a 1M user site and I don't even doubt that that's a good deal for not having to manage a site of such scale, but how many people are $1500/month ready to test an idea?
- deleted 16y ago
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  - onewland 16y ago
    Since you're a Heroku employee (sayeth the HN profile), I assume this is a Socratic-method type question. I don't really care to research it, though, so perhaps you would like to elaborate?
    - ryandotsmith 16y ago
      (I am not speaking on behalf heroku) I am not really sure why New Relic is so expensive. Sorry for being coy with my question.
- deleted 16y ago
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- blutonium 16y ago
  Ad agencies are a good example. They put together a cheesy game as part of a campaign, and need to hit the ground running. Relative to development, creative, and everything else that goes into a campaign, $1,500/mo is a steal.
  - theli0nheart 16y ago
    I work at one, and you'd have to make a really good case to a client to factor in $1,500 / month in hosting costs. Even though it's a small sum compared to total campaign spend, big companies are more into the "wow" factor than anything else. Thus they're more willing to pay for cool designs than that boring hosting stuff. Also, support is extremely important for these big campaigns. Companies want someone to call if things go awry. If Heroku goes down, you're kinda screwed. All we can tell the client is "sorry, Heroku's down. we can't do anything about that." That's something you want to avoid.
- tomfakes 16y ago
  Over the last 2 years, I've built a number of Facebook apps. For the ones that go big, they go big fast! When we started out our business in 2008, we needed to double our capacity every week for 6 weeks. I spent a lot of time adding servers and moving providers as our old one couldn't move fast enough.
aneth 16y ago
I'm not sure this would appeal to "developers" at $1500 per month. Perhaps the CTO of a funded businesses. I was half expecting something in the price range of a mortal individual developer/entrepreneur.
milkshakes 16y ago
It's interesting to me that heroku chose to showcase a realtime app (Clobby) as an example of what they do well. Don't get me wrong, I think heroku works very well in some use cases, but I'm really curious how to get access to the "specialized addons" that enable this behavior, as the heroku I'm familiar with doesn't play well with websockets/comet.
bad_user 16y ago
Heroku is in general too expensive for me. Personally I would go for an AWS Free Tier account + 1 EC2 large instance. Then use the micro instance as the HTTP server, and the large instance for the DB and a 1 GB memcached. That would cost no more than $100 / month and will give you more processing power than what this package offers.

36 points by ph0rque 16y ago

I haven't had to manage a site at that traffic level before, but is there really a use case where you're immediately going from no managed hosting to needing $1500/month in managed hosting? I don't doubt these are the resources necessary for a 1M user site and I don't even doubt that that's a good deal for not having to manage a site of such scale, but how many people are $1500/month ready to test an idea?

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- onewland 16y ago
  Since you're a Heroku employee (sayeth the HN profile), I assume this is a Socratic-method type question. I don't really care to research it, though, so perhaps you would like to elaborate?
  - ryandotsmith 16y ago
    (I am not speaking on behalf heroku) I am not really sure why New Relic is so expensive. Sorry for being coy with my question.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
blutonium 16y ago
Ad agencies are a good example. They put together a cheesy game as part of a campaign, and need to hit the ground running. Relative to development, creative, and everything else that goes into a campaign, $1,500/mo is a steal.
- theli0nheart 16y ago
  I work at one, and you'd have to make a really good case to a client to factor in $1,500 / month in hosting costs. Even though it's a small sum compared to total campaign spend, big companies are more into the "wow" factor than anything else. Thus they're more willing to pay for cool designs than that boring hosting stuff. Also, support is extremely important for these big campaigns. Companies want someone to call if things go awry. If Heroku goes down, you're kinda screwed. All we can tell the client is "sorry, Heroku's down. we can't do anything about that." That's something you want to avoid.
tomfakes 16y ago
Over the last 2 years, I've built a number of Facebook apps. For the ones that go big, they go big fast! When we started out our business in 2008, we needed to double our capacity every week for 6 weeks. I spent a lot of time adding servers and moving providers as our old one couldn't move fast enough.

aneth 16y ago

I'm not sure this would appeal to "developers" at $1500 per month. Perhaps the CTO of a funded businesses. I was half expecting something in the price range of a mortal individual developer/entrepreneur.

milkshakes 16y ago

It's interesting to me that heroku chose to showcase a realtime app (Clobby) as an example of what they do well. Don't get me wrong, I think heroku works very well in some use cases, but I'm really curious how to get access to the "specialized addons" that enable this behavior, as the heroku I'm familiar with doesn't play well with websockets/comet.

bad_user 16y ago

Heroku is in general too expensive for me. Personally I would go for an AWS Free Tier account + 1 EC2 large instance. Then use the micro instance as the HTTP server, and the large instance for the DB and a 1 GB memcached. That would cost no more than $100 / month and will give you more processing power than what this package offers.