8 ms·

Ep.io is closing down, recommending Heroku

157 points by goblin89 15y ago

niels 15y ago
Sad to see them go. We were hosted with them and really liked their service. Good luck to Andrew and Ben.
oellegaard 15y ago
Too bad! Still no django-focused hosting options :-(
- ubercore 15y ago
  https://gondor.io/ https://gondor.io/
  - oellegaard 15y ago
    sorry, * for europe Last time i checked it was in beta as well and we could't migrate media and database to and from the apps there - might be fixed now, maybe time to review them again (and checking if they finally got some servers in europe).
    - lukeman 15y ago
      Gondor launched in September and we provide a load command for data but can also work with you to load existing data and media. Unfortunately we do not have any European data centers yet, but it's something we've planned. If you email support@gondor.io we'll be glad to answer any questions.
  - johnball 15y ago
    does Gondor offer PostGIS on the shared plan?
- gte910h 15y ago
  Heroku's doing Django fine now
- jacobian 15y ago
  Trust me, you really don't want a Django-specific hosting environment. Django's a WSGI framework like the rest of the Python world (even moreso as of 1.4). Supporting any WSGI app is in some ways easier than just supporting Django, so I can't see any good reason why a platform provider wouldn't support any WSGI app. Further, why would you want to choose a platform that locks you into a particular tool? Django's far from the only good choice in the Python web world; don't pick a tool that forces you to put on blinders.
  - slurgfest 15y ago
    This is such a wonderfully respectable statement coming from Mr. Django.
  - webmaven 15y ago
    What would you recommend as a WSGI-specific hosting environment, then?
    - jacobian 15y ago
      I've been happy with Heroku, Dotcloud, and Webfaction. Of the three, Webfaction's the only one that's Python-specific (although not really), but both Heroku and Dotcloud have Pythonistas on staff and take Python support really seriously.
- cwilson 15y ago
  We run Django on Heroku and have zero issues. Absolutely love the service.
  - tocomment 15y ago
    Did you hit any issues deploying?
    - tocomment 15y ago
      This seems like a legitimate question to me, how about commenting about why you disagree with me instead of downvoting?
    - aljosa 15y ago
      static/media files are served from CDN so if you have anything that breaks because of CORS you need to add some code to serve static files through gunicorn.
- ylem 15y ago
  It may not be focused, but I've had good luck with webfaction.
- tbatterii 15y ago
  use wsgi
dguaraglia 15y ago
That's a pity. Ben and Andrew are two of the cleverest (and funniest) devs I've ever met.
- sad_panda 15y ago
  They're not dying or anything...
denzil_correa 15y ago
I believe they were one of the best hosting providers for no-frill Python Django web apps. A lot of Python web app developers like me would appreciate a dedicated, easy migrate Django hosting website. Alas! :-(
- goblin89 15y ago
  Agree. Heroku appears inferior to Ep.io in terms of how easy you can get a Django website up and running, and less flexible. In our case, we use Brunch (node.js-based tool) to build client-side code. With Ep.io, we'd just build the code locally and then do `epio upload`. While Heroku requires everything to go through repository. Since it's impossible, I think, to run a Node.js tool directly on Heroku, we'd need to `git push` compiled code. It is not nice.
  - zrail 15y ago
    You can basically do anything you want on heroku because they allow custom buildpacks. You could make your own buildpack that vendors in node.js and your tool and builds at deploy time. Here's a heroku doc article all about it: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/buildpacks https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/buildpacks
    - goblin89 15y ago
      Thanks for the correction, I didn't read the docs carefully. Buildpack's a better idea than building stuff locally. This makes slightly steeper learning curve the only weakness of Heroku compared to Ep.io.
      - zrail 15y ago
        No problem. They don't actually talk about buildpacks all that much but I see it as the major differentiating feature on Heroku. One thing you may be interested in is heroku-buildpack-multi[1] which lets you run multiple buildpacks. You could theoretically use this to include the standard Python and Node.js buildpacks plus a small custom one that just installs and runs Brunch. [1]: https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi
sriramk 15y ago
I think you'll see a slew of these closures. - The PaaS space is getting squeezed on all directions; from the bottom by CloudFoundry and from the top from people like Heroku, Amazon and from startups like Parse chopping off verticals. Building a proper PaaS platform is a lot of work - tons of little edge cases, security concerns, scale concerns. All of it is very non-trivial and you can't just focus on one little scenario and hope to get away with it. I suspect you'll see more people going the Phpfog->AppFog route, give up the general PaaS platform to CloudFoundry/Amazon/Heroku and try and move up the stack to provide value on top. I have no idea how DotCloud is doing but I'll be very surprised if they're doing well. I I love the team but I think they are in a tough spot.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- andrewgodwin 15y ago
  (I'm one of the two Epio founders) Obviously, we have an interesting view on this whole problem. I'm personally of the opinion that PaaS is still not quite the right solution - there's certainly some progress, but there's such an murky boundary between what a platform and an app provides that it's hard to make something that doesn't surprise people in some way. It's interesting to note that as a PaaS platform you do get an advantage over IaaS - you can share resources and box-pack apps a lot more efficiently when you control memory and disk access at that higher level, so it's not like IaaS is certain to win either. I probably need to compose my thoughts into something more intelligible and write a full blog post about how I think deployment should evolve, but I have a migration to shepherd first.
  - drewvolpe 15y ago
    Please do. I'd be interested in your thoughts.
  - cosmic_shame 15y ago
    As a (sad to see you go) ep.io user thanks for providing the migration tips.
  - 15y ago
ericd 15y ago
When you guys say that you're going to make servers not suck, can you share a bit more about what you mean? Are you referring to dedicated hosting?
malkia 15y ago
I smiled, because such caring about clients knowing the company goes down is simply good stuff. Kudos!
okal 15y ago
Sad to see you go. http://zipf.ep.io http://zipf.ep.io got me my first dev internship.
kingrolo 15y ago
Boo. Such a shame. Of all the PaaS offerings Ep.io was the one I was really rooting for. There was a real personal feel to the service - support email repies from Andrew directly, and an always active IRC channel. PaaS sounds like it could make my life so much simpler. I've tried out Ep.io, Heroku and DotCloud, and have test apps continuing to run in all of them but none of them are quite right yet for me to trust a client's production site in, so I'm yet another person replicating using Linode VPSs and a custom build and provisioning script. Best of luck to all involved with Ep.io, and it's commendable to see their dignified plan including working with helping their customers move away to other services.
- bastichelaar 15y ago
  I'm very curious what's not right with the mentioned services? Why don't you trust them yet?
orblivion 15y ago
Kindof worrisome that you can't seem to rely on these interesting hosting services because they're liable to go out of business in a few months. That said, it's nice that these guys give over a month to migrate, and instructions.
- Ixiaus 15y ago
  That's a risk you run using services provided for by anyone other than yourself. My bank could suddenly go under and I would have to switch banks... It's not just in the software world, that's anything.
kilian 15y ago
I'm sad to see epio go, it was/is a great tool and I always got stellar service from Andrew and Ben. I've been using Ep.io for a number of apps, but one of them is http://laserey.es http://laserey.es, which uses openCV. Andrew installed it on epio without a hitch, but I haven't found any other cloud hosting that offers it. Does anyone have suggestions where I could migrate it to?
- Estragon 15y ago
  You might find this comment suggests a way to do it on heroku. (Wishy-washy language because I have no direct experience with buildpacks.) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3860312 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3860312
zenmaster100 15y ago
Dear Hacker News Users, In recent Hakin9 Extra issue devoted to Forensics, there is a plethora of articles on Forensics and especially one article devoted to cloud forensics. I recommend that you check hakin9(dot)org for previous issues, amongst which there is an issue devoted to cloud only. The teaser available here. http://hakin9.org/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2012/04/Hakin9-Extra-April-teaser.pdf?a_aid=michalwisniewski&a_bid=8f6377e8 http://hakin9.org/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2012/04/Hakin...
japhyr 15y ago
Does anyone have any feedback about OpenShift by Red Hat? They were at PyCon and it sounded interesting. I tried openshift and heroku, and heroku was easier for me to get up and running with, but I am still interested in OpenShift.
rdl 15y ago
Kind of surprised you didn't do a sale to Heroku or DotCloud (or another PaaS or an IaaS), maybe as an aqui-hire. If nothing else, convert income into capital gains.

157 points by goblin89 15y ago

niels 15y ago

Sad to see them go. We were hosted with them and really liked their service. Good luck to Andrew and Ben.

oellegaard 15y ago

Too bad! Still no django-focused hosting options :-(

ubercore 15y ago
https://gondor.io/ https://gondor.io/
- oellegaard 15y ago
  sorry, * for europe Last time i checked it was in beta as well and we could't migrate media and database to and from the apps there - might be fixed now, maybe time to review them again (and checking if they finally got some servers in europe).
  - lukeman 15y ago
    Gondor launched in September and we provide a load command for data but can also work with you to load existing data and media. Unfortunately we do not have any European data centers yet, but it's something we've planned. If you email support@gondor.io we'll be glad to answer any questions.
- johnball 15y ago
  does Gondor offer PostGIS on the shared plan?
gte910h 15y ago
Heroku's doing Django fine now
jacobian 15y ago
Trust me, you really don't want a Django-specific hosting environment. Django's a WSGI framework like the rest of the Python world (even moreso as of 1.4). Supporting any WSGI app is in some ways easier than just supporting Django, so I can't see any good reason why a platform provider wouldn't support any WSGI app. Further, why would you want to choose a platform that locks you into a particular tool? Django's far from the only good choice in the Python web world; don't pick a tool that forces you to put on blinders.
- slurgfest 15y ago
  This is such a wonderfully respectable statement coming from Mr. Django.
- webmaven 15y ago
  What would you recommend as a WSGI-specific hosting environment, then?
  - jacobian 15y ago
    I've been happy with Heroku, Dotcloud, and Webfaction. Of the three, Webfaction's the only one that's Python-specific (although not really), but both Heroku and Dotcloud have Pythonistas on staff and take Python support really seriously.
cwilson 15y ago
We run Django on Heroku and have zero issues. Absolutely love the service.
- tocomment 15y ago
  Did you hit any issues deploying?
  - tocomment 15y ago
    This seems like a legitimate question to me, how about commenting about why you disagree with me instead of downvoting?
  - aljosa 15y ago
    static/media files are served from CDN so if you have anything that breaks because of CORS you need to add some code to serve static files through gunicorn.
ylem 15y ago
It may not be focused, but I've had good luck with webfaction.
tbatterii 15y ago
use wsgi

dguaraglia 15y ago

That's a pity. Ben and Andrew are two of the cleverest (and funniest) devs I've ever met.

sad_panda 15y ago
They're not dying or anything...

denzil_correa 15y ago

I believe they were one of the best hosting providers for no-frill Python Django web apps. A lot of Python web app developers like me would appreciate a dedicated, easy migrate Django hosting website. Alas! :-(

goblin89 15y ago
Agree. Heroku appears inferior to Ep.io in terms of how easy you can get a Django website up and running, and less flexible. In our case, we use Brunch (node.js-based tool) to build client-side code. With Ep.io, we'd just build the code locally and then do `epio upload`. While Heroku requires everything to go through repository. Since it's impossible, I think, to run a Node.js tool directly on Heroku, we'd need to `git push` compiled code. It is not nice.
- zrail 15y ago
  You can basically do anything you want on heroku because they allow custom buildpacks. You could make your own buildpack that vendors in node.js and your tool and builds at deploy time. Here's a heroku doc article all about it: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/buildpacks https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/buildpacks
  - goblin89 15y ago
    Thanks for the correction, I didn't read the docs carefully. Buildpack's a better idea than building stuff locally. This makes slightly steeper learning curve the only weakness of Heroku compared to Ep.io.
    - zrail 15y ago
      No problem. They don't actually talk about buildpacks all that much but I see it as the major differentiating feature on Heroku. One thing you may be interested in is heroku-buildpack-multi[1] which lets you run multiple buildpacks. You could theoretically use this to include the standard Python and Node.js buildpacks plus a small custom one that just installs and runs Brunch. [1]: https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi

sriramk 15y ago

I think you'll see a slew of these closures. - The PaaS space is getting squeezed on all directions; from the bottom by CloudFoundry and from the top from people like Heroku, Amazon and from startups like Parse chopping off verticals. Building a proper PaaS platform is a lot of work - tons of little edge cases, security concerns, scale concerns. All of it is very non-trivial and you can't just focus on one little scenario and hope to get away with it. I suspect you'll see more people going the Phpfog->AppFog route, give up the general PaaS platform to CloudFoundry/Amazon/Heroku and try and move up the stack to provide value on top. I have no idea how DotCloud is doing but I'll be very surprised if they're doing well. I I love the team but I think they are in a tough spot.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
andrewgodwin 15y ago
(I'm one of the two Epio founders) Obviously, we have an interesting view on this whole problem. I'm personally of the opinion that PaaS is still not quite the right solution - there's certainly some progress, but there's such an murky boundary between what a platform and an app provides that it's hard to make something that doesn't surprise people in some way. It's interesting to note that as a PaaS platform you do get an advantage over IaaS - you can share resources and box-pack apps a lot more efficiently when you control memory and disk access at that higher level, so it's not like IaaS is certain to win either. I probably need to compose my thoughts into something more intelligible and write a full blog post about how I think deployment should evolve, but I have a migration to shepherd first.
- drewvolpe 15y ago
  Please do. I'd be interested in your thoughts.
- cosmic_shame 15y ago
  As a (sad to see you go) ep.io user thanks for providing the migration tips.
- 15y ago

ericd 15y ago

When you guys say that you're going to make servers not suck, can you share a bit more about what you mean? Are you referring to dedicated hosting?

malkia 15y ago

I smiled, because such caring about clients knowing the company goes down is simply good stuff. Kudos!

okal 15y ago

Sad to see you go. http://zipf.ep.io http://zipf.ep.io got me my first dev internship.

kingrolo 15y ago

Boo. Such a shame. Of all the PaaS offerings Ep.io was the one I was really rooting for. There was a real personal feel to the service - support email repies from Andrew directly, and an always active IRC channel. PaaS sounds like it could make my life so much simpler. I've tried out Ep.io, Heroku and DotCloud, and have test apps continuing to run in all of them but none of them are quite right yet for me to trust a client's production site in, so I'm yet another person replicating using Linode VPSs and a custom build and provisioning script. Best of luck to all involved with Ep.io, and it's commendable to see their dignified plan including working with helping their customers move away to other services.

bastichelaar 15y ago
I'm very curious what's not right with the mentioned services? Why don't you trust them yet?

orblivion 15y ago

Kindof worrisome that you can't seem to rely on these interesting hosting services because they're liable to go out of business in a few months. That said, it's nice that these guys give over a month to migrate, and instructions.

Ixiaus 15y ago
That's a risk you run using services provided for by anyone other than yourself. My bank could suddenly go under and I would have to switch banks... It's not just in the software world, that's anything.

kilian 15y ago

I'm sad to see epio go, it was/is a great tool and I always got stellar service from Andrew and Ben. I've been using Ep.io for a number of apps, but one of them is http://laserey.es http://laserey.es, which uses openCV. Andrew installed it on epio without a hitch, but I haven't found any other cloud hosting that offers it. Does anyone have suggestions where I could migrate it to?

Estragon 15y ago
You might find this comment suggests a way to do it on heroku. (Wishy-washy language because I have no direct experience with buildpacks.) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3860312 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3860312

zenmaster100 15y ago

Dear Hacker News Users, In recent Hakin9 Extra issue devoted to Forensics, there is a plethora of articles on Forensics and especially one article devoted to cloud forensics. I recommend that you check hakin9(dot)org for previous issues, amongst which there is an issue devoted to cloud only. The teaser available here. http://hakin9.org/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2012/04/Hakin9-Extra-April-teaser.pdf?a_aid=michalwisniewski&a_bid=8f6377e8 http://hakin9.org/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2012/04/Hakin...

japhyr 15y ago

Does anyone have any feedback about OpenShift by Red Hat? They were at PyCon and it sounded interesting. I tried openshift and heroku, and heroku was easier for me to get up and running with, but I am still interested in OpenShift.

rdl 15y ago

Kind of surprised you didn't do a sale to Heroku or DotCloud (or another PaaS or an IaaS), maybe as an aqui-hire. If nothing else, convert income into capital gains.