4 ms·

Cheapest plan: $200/month. That seems a bit high... what competes with this?

by esja 15y ago

bdotdub 15y ago
When you think about all the setup, SysAdmin stuff, backups, scaling, etc you'll avoid, $200 a month ($2.4k) is pretty cheap to be able to just switch a scalable db on at a moments notice.
- jbigelow76 15y ago
  $200 is cheap but I'm hoping they eventually put out an option closer to the $40/mo price point just so I can play around with Postgre (I'm currently a MS SQLServer guy that wants to start branching out). I don't want to spin up a new AWS and waste time with configuration and other things and don't want to worry about hosing a currently running instance just to have a new sandbox to play in. I'd pay a reasonable amount to have something akin to a cheap "test" instance in exchange for giving up things like an SLA or dedicated support.
  - einhverfr 15y ago
    If you want to just play around with it, why not download and install it? No charge for that.....
  - rmgraham 15y ago
    Their shared DB hosting is free or 5MB and $15/mo for 20GB. It's not going to have all fancy features of the dedicated (fork, follow, etc) but it is Postgres at least.
salsakran 15y ago
http://aws.amazon.com/rds/ http://aws.amazon.com/rds/ I believe Heroku used EC2 under the hood before the Salesforce acquisition. Whether postgres (vs MySQL), the polish and better ui/workflow of heroku is worth the premium over RDS depends on you.
- mcs 15y ago
  Heroku dynos are still ran on EC2 instances, exclusively on the East coast of the US. I'm not sure if these postgres servers are. However one interesting note is that the "maximum database size" of the heroku server is 2TB, while RDS is 1TB.
absconditus 15y ago
Seems high compared to what?
- jhaile 15y ago
  Seems high compared to the cost of a comparable EC2 node. Of course - you avoid the administrative costs. But it's pretty expensive for an early-stage startup. Possibly a good deal for a larger company, but at that point you might prefer to just configure the EC2 nodes, backups, etc. yourself and save a good bit of $ every month.
  - thibaut_barrere 15y ago
    On the other hand, $200 is a common price for two hours of Rails consulting these days. So as a developer bootstrapping a product, I'd rather pay for this and sleep well (one of their bullet point). I'd be curious to know how reliable it is in practice, compared to a home-grown EC2 setup.
    - jhaile 15y ago
      Plus if you need a larger instance like a 7.5GB RAM instance, it's $800/month on Heroku vs $75/month for a reserved EC2 instance with comparable RAM. That's an astounding difference in price for cloud storage! Of course, the real competition is other data-storage services like Amazon RDS, MongoHQ, MongoLab, etc. (all much cheaper) (OK, so I excluded EBS costs from my EC2 comparison above but at $0.10/GB-month it's still going to be a huge difference for most cases)
      - omfg 15y ago
        Your numbers are a bit off. It's more like 162 bucks a month for a comparable reserved EC2 instance. And 208 a month for a comparable reserved RDS instance. And that's of course with a 12 month commitment. You can't really compare EC2 to an offering like this because you're paying for the amount of time / labor costs it frees up. And of course RDS doesn't support Postgres so there's not a lot of competition at the moment.
thibaut_barrere 15y ago
It's some money but I'm definitely interested. Scroll down and you see some interesting things: - fork of databases (looks great to try out migrations easily) - read-only asynchronous replicas - connection from EC2 or elsewhere - health checks and "continuous protection" Looks fairly solid at first sight.
1gor 15y ago
what competes with this? http://xeround.com http://xeround.com is a separate DB service, also heroku plugin. It is MySql-compatible, apparently they've wrote a custom distributed engine. Its is located on AWS or rackspace, so latency is quite low. Since xeround is pay-as-you go, if your initial DB requirements are low, you can run it on something like http://fluxflex.com http://fluxflex.com (which heroku-like PaaS, also AWS-based) and have 10 db-backed apps for something like $3 per month that will scale up when needed.

Cheapest plan: $200/month. That seems a bit high... what competes with this?

by esja 15y ago

Cheapest plan: $200/month. That seems a bit high... what competes with this?

When you think about all the setup, SysAdmin stuff, backups, scaling, etc you'll avoid, $200 a month ($2.4k) is pretty cheap to be able to just switch a scalable db on at a moments notice.

jbigelow76 15y ago
$200 is cheap but I'm hoping they eventually put out an option closer to the $40/mo price point just so I can play around with Postgre (I'm currently a MS SQLServer guy that wants to start branching out). I don't want to spin up a new AWS and waste time with configuration and other things and don't want to worry about hosing a currently running instance just to have a new sandbox to play in. I'd pay a reasonable amount to have something akin to a cheap "test" instance in exchange for giving up things like an SLA or dedicated support.
- einhverfr 15y ago
  If you want to just play around with it, why not download and install it? No charge for that.....
- rmgraham 15y ago
  Their shared DB hosting is free or 5MB and $15/mo for 20GB. It's not going to have all fancy features of the dedicated (fork, follow, etc) but it is Postgres at least.

salsakran 15y ago

http://aws.amazon.com/rds/ http://aws.amazon.com/rds/ I believe Heroku used EC2 under the hood before the Salesforce acquisition. Whether postgres (vs MySQL), the polish and better ui/workflow of heroku is worth the premium over RDS depends on you.

mcs 15y ago
Heroku dynos are still ran on EC2 instances, exclusively on the East coast of the US. I'm not sure if these postgres servers are. However one interesting note is that the "maximum database size" of the heroku server is 2TB, while RDS is 1TB.

absconditus 15y ago

Seems high compared to what?

jhaile 15y ago
Seems high compared to the cost of a comparable EC2 node. Of course - you avoid the administrative costs. But it's pretty expensive for an early-stage startup. Possibly a good deal for a larger company, but at that point you might prefer to just configure the EC2 nodes, backups, etc. yourself and save a good bit of $ every month.
- thibaut_barrere 15y ago
  On the other hand, $200 is a common price for two hours of Rails consulting these days. So as a developer bootstrapping a product, I'd rather pay for this and sleep well (one of their bullet point). I'd be curious to know how reliable it is in practice, compared to a home-grown EC2 setup.
  - jhaile 15y ago
    Plus if you need a larger instance like a 7.5GB RAM instance, it's $800/month on Heroku vs $75/month for a reserved EC2 instance with comparable RAM. That's an astounding difference in price for cloud storage! Of course, the real competition is other data-storage services like Amazon RDS, MongoHQ, MongoLab, etc. (all much cheaper) (OK, so I excluded EBS costs from my EC2 comparison above but at $0.10/GB-month it's still going to be a huge difference for most cases)
    - omfg 15y ago
      Your numbers are a bit off. It's more like 162 bucks a month for a comparable reserved EC2 instance. And 208 a month for a comparable reserved RDS instance. And that's of course with a 12 month commitment. You can't really compare EC2 to an offering like this because you're paying for the amount of time / labor costs it frees up. And of course RDS doesn't support Postgres so there's not a lot of competition at the moment.

thibaut_barrere 15y ago

It's some money but I'm definitely interested. Scroll down and you see some interesting things: - fork of databases (looks great to try out migrations easily) - read-only asynchronous replicas - connection from EC2 or elsewhere - health checks and "continuous protection" Looks fairly solid at first sight.

1gor 15y ago

what competes with this? http://xeround.com http://xeround.com is a separate DB service, also heroku plugin. It is MySql-compatible, apparently they've wrote a custom distributed engine. Its is located on AWS or rackspace, so latency is quite low. Since xeround is pay-as-you go, if your initial DB requirements are low, you can run it on something like http://fluxflex.com http://fluxflex.com (which heroku-like PaaS, also AWS-based) and have 10 db-backed apps for something like $3 per month that will scale up when needed.