7 ms·

Heroku Class Action

134 points by jeremyjarvis 14y ago

outside1234 14y ago
oh look, a parasitic lawyer-company trying to suck some money out of a technology company. it must be a day that ends in -y.
- stevenp 14y ago
  You honestly don't believe that, if the allegations are true, Heroku has done something wrong?
  - zanny 14y ago
    I'd rather see everyone move away from Heroku than waste everyones time and money on the legal system, personally. The only ones who would win in a business class joint suit case would be the lawyers on both sides.
  - wmf 14y ago
    I don't think a class action lawsuit will right Heroku's wrongs, considering that most of the money ends up going to lawyers.
  - georgemcbay 14y ago
    I think what Heroku did is wrong, but I still think class action suits are usually complete bullshit. The lawyers make off with millions or billions while distributing peanuts to the class action plaintiffs. Inequitable money distribution aside, I think the bad press Heroku has received over this is probably enough punishment. I don't support how they handled this situation but the core problem isn't exactly that bad in the first place. Nobody died here, some companies simply had slow websites and to some degree that's their own fault, they should have done their own external monitoring if that sort of critical performance was that vital to them.
tlrobinson 14y ago
General question: do class action lawsuits need to be sponsored/initiated by an actual plaintiff, or can lawyers just start a bunch of class actions hoping one will eventually stick and they'll get some fees out of them? Edit: s/defendant/plaintiff/
- sachingulaya 14y ago
  The procedure for filing a class action is to file suit with one or several named plaintiffs on behalf of a proposed class. The proposed class must consist of a group of individuals or business entities that have suffered a common injury or injuries. Typically these cases result from an action on the part of a business or a particular product defect or policy that applied to all proposed class members in a typical manner. After the complaint is filed, the plaintiff must file a motion to have the class certified. In some cases class certification may require discovery in order to determine its size and if the proposed class meets the standard for class certification. Upon the motion to certify the class, the defendants may object to whether the issues are appropriately handled as a class action, to whether the named plaintiffs are sufficiently representative of the class, and to their relationship with the law firm or firms handling the case. The court will also examine the ability of the firm to prosecute the claim for the plaintiffs, and their resources for dealing with class actions. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_action http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_action
- nivloc 14y ago
  They probably haven't filed anything, if they get a couple bites then they will.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
reddit_clone 14y ago
Ahh.. the smell of blood in the water!
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
goronbjorn 14y ago
Is this in any way affiliated with Rap Genius? In either case, you should make it abundantly clear where you stand, as they're very publicly involved with this spat.
- biot 14y ago
  From the Wired article, it appears the law firm is fishing for a lead plaintiff: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/hieroku/ http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/hieroku/
endianswap 14y ago
This is interesting, because I don't remember any similar class action lawsuits/attempts like this in the tech/SAAS sector, though I've often heard of threats. Have there been any similar attempts?
- CamperBob2 14y ago
  Right now there are a lot more lawyers in the US than there is honest work for them. Not hard to see what's coming.
wheaties 14y ago
wtf is this? No one will get money from this. Last time I checked I got a .06 payout from some company that supposedly defrauded me of over $60. Quite a payout. Lawyers took 30% right off the top. Hmm.. maybe someone will make money.
resu_nimda 14y ago
Wow, seriously? This is way over the top and unnecessarily snide ("Heroku...supposedly assists web application developers"). Stop Heroku? Pretty sure nobody's gonna get on board with that. What is it even trying to accomplish? As far as I can tell it's essentially an ad for that law firm.
- cracell 14y ago
  While I agree this does seem to just be a law firm trying to make some money, Heroku did directly lie to developers about Cedar stack's routing being "intelligent" when it is indeed random. New Relic's plugin was pretty quickly updated to include the missing time after the rapgenius article came out. But that doesn't excuse Heroku from lying about what they were selling and so far they've done nothing to make amends for those lies.
  - rdegges 14y ago
    The misleading documentation that started all the controversy was about Heroku's legacy Bamboo stack, not the new Cedar stack. The Cedar stack (which Heroku has been encouraging people to use for a long while now) has always claimed to do random routing.
    - redguava 14y ago
      This isn't true. Their main "how it works" page claimed intelligent routing with no mention of which stack. This has been changed since the uproar. There are other places the same. This is only part of the whole story as well.
thetrumanshow 14y ago
Dear Heroku, slice off a piece of your offering that shows some love to the Ruby community again. Lets call it the Maple stack. Have this stack use the old routing infrastructure. Edit: To be clear, I do not support this legal action. I do want Heroku to hear the community, but I don't want it to go this far.
- fomb 14y ago
  There is no 'old' routing infrastructure. It has never changed on each stack (but that's not to say they are the same. I don't know about that)
- aneth4 14y ago
  The old bamboo stack has the same old intelligent routing, but the intelligence is only within each router. When the number of routers increased, the intelligence stopped mattering because concurrent requests were highly likely to not be handled by the same router, making the routing effectively random instead of intelligent. So what you suggest would be great, but unfortunately not possible.
  - wmf 14y ago
    I'll just repeat my previous comment: For $60,000 per month they can't create a mode where all your dynos are behind a single HAProxy with "intelligent" least-connections load balancing?
    - thetrumanshow 14y ago
      In other terms: "Damn, the hallways in this building are getting too crowded, lets add some more hallways and shit and lets add new rooms... Later: damn, this is getting complicated. Peopke are piling up in doorways, theyre losing patience and leaving (or being forced to leave to ease the congestion)... Wish there was something we could do!" Wmf: "Build another building, geeez!"
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
makerbreaker 14y ago
This must be the Kim Kardashian of law firms.
orangethirty 14y ago
This is why you don't fuck around with PR issues. They can easily turn into lawsuits.
- socalnate1 14y ago
  This is America, everything can easily turn into a lawsuit. Even if Heroku had handled the PR issue perfectly, it's very likely some enterprising lawyer would still be looking to sue.
  - orangethirty 14y ago
    True, but they would not have had to deal with a bunch of pissed off customers.
aneth4 14y ago
My startup is heavily invested in and tied to Heroku. We don't have the resources right now to get off of the platform quickly, but plan to as soon as possible. Like Rapleaf, we have spent an enormous amount of effort optimizing and searching for the causes of latency, and overpay for dynos to reduce but not eliminate the chance of latency issues. Heroku has always told us it's our fault. While I have no interest in recovering money through a class action lawsuit - which is just grossly unproductive - my confidence in heroku has been shattered and I am embarrassed to have chosen and advocated for them for so long. I look forward to getting off their platform for good, and there is no way I could recommend it to others for similar applications. Heroku's most recent statement does nothing to resolve the issue for most of their customers, and does not reduce what is clearly a gross overpricing and misrepresentation of what they provide. It's quite clear that Heroku is not just a bad, but a horrible choice for rails applications that are not carefully designed for concurrency and don't go against Heroku recommendations and use a concurrent application server.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  - JangoSteve 14y ago
    EDIT: I don't necessarily support a class action lawsuit against Heroku, but in the interest of conversation... Scalability is not a magic knob you can twist as far as you want… Isn't that the problem? That's Heroku's selling point is that scaling is basically a magic knob. Here are some of the things on their homepage right now: deploy and scale powerful apps Focus 100% on your code, and never think about servers, instances, or VMs again. Run any web or background process with any web framework or worker type. Scale distributed processes effortlessly with a single command. Easily scale to millions of users. Your comment seems to be defending Heroku, by saying Heroku is lying.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
zdgman 14y ago
Can we please get this site hosted on Heroku for the irony?
marcamillion 14y ago
Ok this is going too far. Did Heroku make a mistake? Yes. Did they mislead and lie to their customers? Yes. But is it worth pursuing a class action lawsuit that could ultimately ruin them - if not financially, but force their mgmt team to focus on this damn suit rather than fixing the damn problems? Hells no. I hope RapGenius is not the lead plaintiff in this, otherwise I will be very disappointed. I applaud them for raising this issue, and doing all the research they did. We are all much better off for it. I applaud them for sticking to their guns to make sure Heroku fixes the issue. But if they join this class action suit, in my humble opinion, it is one step too far. What is the max they can realistically expect to get back from Heroku? $250K? $500K? Surely not the entire $20K/mo, so I doubt it will be that much. Given all the money they have raised so far, if I were one of their investors I would start to ask questions about if they are wasting their time frivolously beating a dead horse. This is getting into 'bad karma' territory. I am sure someone, at some point, will want to sue RapGenius....they may remember how they behave now. So yes, keep up the pressure, and keep forcing Heroku to fix their faulty systems. But a class action suit dawg? I think not.
- redguava 14y ago
  They blatantly lied about how a core part of their service worked for years. It was raised to them previously and they didn't change the docs nor the way their system worked. This negatively affected a lot of their customers in many ways (overspending on heroku, time wasted, lost customers and revenue). When Heroku's customers have incurred significant costs and/or losses because of Heroku's false claims, I don't see why this is so inappropriate. We need to make companies accountable for their claims. For context, I am a Heroku customer and have been significantly affected by all of this. I won't participate in the lawsuit but I can understand why others would.
  - marcamillion 14y ago
    They didn't "blatantly lie"....they lied. They built their product 1 way and it morphed into another architecture as they grew. They made decisions that optimized for their financial benefit, but I wouldn't go as far as to say they "blatantly lied". Let's not get too carried away here. As a long time Heroku user, I was pissed when I heard this...but they have done so much good for my own development career and freelance gigs, that this is easily forgiveable with a slap on the wrist and a partial refund to customers that have paid a lot over the years. More than likely, they just never realized how big of a deal it was - because they were busy expanding. A few customers (few being relative to their total support requests) probably did inquire and some manager probably developed the response that they are aware of the problem, but not dealing with it right now. It's not as if they built the company on the premise that they are going to say 1 thing and do something else. This is just something that fell through the cracks as they grew. Let's not blow it out of proportion.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
Bradosaur 14y ago
This isn't some grassroots action lead by startup CTOs across the valley. This is just a lawyer searching for a lead plantiff. I find the site rather misleading, and ultimately trashy. (Disclaimer: I am personally opposed to class action lawsuits.)
methodin 14y ago
Do class action lawsuits actually have any effect on business practices? Just seems like an extortion that is somehow legal. No one benefits but the lawyers. Recently I've been included in a bunch unbeknownst to me that require me to submit written notes within a week of notice to NOT be included. Why can't we just eliminate the middleman in these cases to cause real change?
the_cat_kittles 14y ago
Is there a similar service that is better than Heroku that anyone would recommend switching to?
- tracker1 14y ago
  Depends on your platform... AppFog.com supports a few...
redthrowaway 14y ago
Polemic though this site may be, my understanding of the situation leads me to believe that it makes no false claims. If this is so, Heroku has a problem on its hands: its behaviour is such that it has alienated current customers and, more importantly, dissuaded potential future customers from employing the platform. Heroku's challenges seem threefold: One, they need to get their infrastructure in line with their branding, or vice versa. Two, they need to assuage the doubts of current customers and offer them convincing reasons to stay. Three, their image and reputation have taken a nosedive. I can't see well-informed potential customers considering Heroku without taking this saga into consideration. This would appear to be the most difficult, and the most important, challenge to solve. Heroku needs image rehabilitation in a big way. The only way I can see them achieving that goal is through increased honesty and engagement with their potential customer base. Unfortunately, I haven't seen anything from them that suggests they're adopting that strategy.
jyap 14y ago
Anyone else spot the "I see what you did there?" with the Notes screen shot? http://herokuclassaction.com/how-to-make-heroku-comply-with-its-promises.php http://herokuclassaction.com/how-to-make-heroku-comply-with-... That dig makes it personal.
tubbo 14y ago
are you fucking serious
jwrubel 14y ago
Attorney 'Values' page includes stock photo of corporate jet. Aaaaand we're done here, folks. http://kristensenlaw.com/values.php http://kristensenlaw.com/values.php
uid 14y ago
It is going to be interesting when this gets to discovery, and we find out what Heroku were saying internally this entire time about the issue. There are bound to be internal emails that discuss this issue and what to do (or not to do) about it. For this reason I can see this being settled. Perhaps refunds and an apology.
pg 14y ago
Interestingly, someone tried to spam a bunch of comment threads with this a few days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=herokulawsuit http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=herokulawsuit
NicoJuicy 14y ago
It's to technical... I don't see a reason why you'd win. Lies happen all the time, i saw someone here mention that Heroku didn't knew it was such a big deal. They are expanding a lot, the issue (intelligent routing) has been raised and will be solved. They know what they've done wrong now... They didn't see it as a big issue before. It's up to Heroku to resolve the problem, because at the end of the day it's an issue to be fixed. And don't we see issues all the time in software development. As long as the company itselves communicate about the problem and is honest about it when the problem comes up. That's the only thing i would really care. PS. I'm not associated (employed or client) by Heroku.
mark_l_watson 14y ago
Sorry in advance for being a little off topic here: which VPS hosting companies have the best reputation for automatically restarting your failed VPS (for any reason) from the most recent backup? Many years ago, I was on vacation without an Internet access and my host provider restarted my instance and since I set up my services to start on boot up, all was good. I would guess that I am a typical customer who does not really need fast scalability. I host several web apps with a modest number of users and what I care most about is reliability and then cost.

134 points by jeremyjarvis 14y ago

oh look, a parasitic lawyer-company trying to suck some money out of a technology company. it must be a day that ends in -y.

stevenp 14y ago
You honestly don't believe that, if the allegations are true, Heroku has done something wrong?
- zanny 14y ago
  I'd rather see everyone move away from Heroku than waste everyones time and money on the legal system, personally. The only ones who would win in a business class joint suit case would be the lawyers on both sides.
- wmf 14y ago
  I don't think a class action lawsuit will right Heroku's wrongs, considering that most of the money ends up going to lawyers.
- georgemcbay 14y ago
  I think what Heroku did is wrong, but I still think class action suits are usually complete bullshit. The lawyers make off with millions or billions while distributing peanuts to the class action plaintiffs. Inequitable money distribution aside, I think the bad press Heroku has received over this is probably enough punishment. I don't support how they handled this situation but the core problem isn't exactly that bad in the first place. Nobody died here, some companies simply had slow websites and to some degree that's their own fault, they should have done their own external monitoring if that sort of critical performance was that vital to them.

tlrobinson 14y ago

General question: do class action lawsuits need to be sponsored/initiated by an actual plaintiff, or can lawyers just start a bunch of class actions hoping one will eventually stick and they'll get some fees out of them? Edit: s/defendant/plaintiff/

sachingulaya 14y ago
The procedure for filing a class action is to file suit with one or several named plaintiffs on behalf of a proposed class. The proposed class must consist of a group of individuals or business entities that have suffered a common injury or injuries. Typically these cases result from an action on the part of a business or a particular product defect or policy that applied to all proposed class members in a typical manner. After the complaint is filed, the plaintiff must file a motion to have the class certified. In some cases class certification may require discovery in order to determine its size and if the proposed class meets the standard for class certification. Upon the motion to certify the class, the defendants may object to whether the issues are appropriately handled as a class action, to whether the named plaintiffs are sufficiently representative of the class, and to their relationship with the law firm or firms handling the case. The court will also examine the ability of the firm to prosecute the claim for the plaintiffs, and their resources for dealing with class actions. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_action http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_action
nivloc 14y ago
They probably haven't filed anything, if they get a couple bites then they will.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

reddit_clone 14y ago

Ahh.. the smell of blood in the water!

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

goronbjorn 14y ago

Is this in any way affiliated with Rap Genius? In either case, you should make it abundantly clear where you stand, as they're very publicly involved with this spat.

biot 14y ago
From the Wired article, it appears the law firm is fishing for a lead plaintiff: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/hieroku/ http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/hieroku/

endianswap 14y ago

This is interesting, because I don't remember any similar class action lawsuits/attempts like this in the tech/SAAS sector, though I've often heard of threats. Have there been any similar attempts?

CamperBob2 14y ago
Right now there are a lot more lawyers in the US than there is honest work for them. Not hard to see what's coming.

wheaties 14y ago

wtf is this? No one will get money from this. Last time I checked I got a .06 payout from some company that supposedly defrauded me of over $60. Quite a payout. Lawyers took 30% right off the top. Hmm.. maybe someone will make money.

resu_nimda 14y ago

Wow, seriously? This is way over the top and unnecessarily snide ("Heroku...supposedly assists web application developers"). Stop Heroku? Pretty sure nobody's gonna get on board with that. What is it even trying to accomplish? As far as I can tell it's essentially an ad for that law firm.

cracell 14y ago
While I agree this does seem to just be a law firm trying to make some money, Heroku did directly lie to developers about Cedar stack's routing being "intelligent" when it is indeed random. New Relic's plugin was pretty quickly updated to include the missing time after the rapgenius article came out. But that doesn't excuse Heroku from lying about what they were selling and so far they've done nothing to make amends for those lies.
- rdegges 14y ago
  The misleading documentation that started all the controversy was about Heroku's legacy Bamboo stack, not the new Cedar stack. The Cedar stack (which Heroku has been encouraging people to use for a long while now) has always claimed to do random routing.
  - redguava 14y ago
    This isn't true. Their main "how it works" page claimed intelligent routing with no mention of which stack. This has been changed since the uproar. There are other places the same. This is only part of the whole story as well.

thetrumanshow 14y ago

Dear Heroku, slice off a piece of your offering that shows some love to the Ruby community again. Lets call it the Maple stack. Have this stack use the old routing infrastructure. Edit: To be clear, I do not support this legal action. I do want Heroku to hear the community, but I don't want it to go this far.

fomb 14y ago
There is no 'old' routing infrastructure. It has never changed on each stack (but that's not to say they are the same. I don't know about that)
aneth4 14y ago
The old bamboo stack has the same old intelligent routing, but the intelligence is only within each router. When the number of routers increased, the intelligence stopped mattering because concurrent requests were highly likely to not be handled by the same router, making the routing effectively random instead of intelligent. So what you suggest would be great, but unfortunately not possible.
- wmf 14y ago
  I'll just repeat my previous comment: For $60,000 per month they can't create a mode where all your dynos are behind a single HAProxy with "intelligent" least-connections load balancing?
  - thetrumanshow 14y ago
    In other terms: "Damn, the hallways in this building are getting too crowded, lets add some more hallways and shit and lets add new rooms... Later: damn, this is getting complicated. Peopke are piling up in doorways, theyre losing patience and leaving (or being forced to leave to ease the congestion)... Wish there was something we could do!" Wmf: "Build another building, geeez!"
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

makerbreaker 14y ago

This must be the Kim Kardashian of law firms.

orangethirty 14y ago

This is why you don't fuck around with PR issues. They can easily turn into lawsuits.

socalnate1 14y ago
This is America, everything can easily turn into a lawsuit. Even if Heroku had handled the PR issue perfectly, it's very likely some enterprising lawyer would still be looking to sue.
- orangethirty 14y ago
  True, but they would not have had to deal with a bunch of pissed off customers.

aneth4 14y ago

My startup is heavily invested in and tied to Heroku. We don't have the resources right now to get off of the platform quickly, but plan to as soon as possible. Like Rapleaf, we have spent an enormous amount of effort optimizing and searching for the causes of latency, and overpay for dynos to reduce but not eliminate the chance of latency issues. Heroku has always told us it's our fault. While I have no interest in recovering money through a class action lawsuit - which is just grossly unproductive - my confidence in heroku has been shattered and I am embarrassed to have chosen and advocated for them for so long. I look forward to getting off their platform for good, and there is no way I could recommend it to others for similar applications. Heroku's most recent statement does nothing to resolve the issue for most of their customers, and does not reduce what is clearly a gross overpricing and misrepresentation of what they provide. It's quite clear that Heroku is not just a bad, but a horrible choice for rails applications that are not carefully designed for concurrency and don't go against Heroku recommendations and use a concurrent application server.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- JangoSteve 14y ago
  EDIT: I don't necessarily support a class action lawsuit against Heroku, but in the interest of conversation... Scalability is not a magic knob you can twist as far as you want… Isn't that the problem? That's Heroku's selling point is that scaling is basically a magic knob. Here are some of the things on their homepage right now: deploy and scale powerful apps Focus 100% on your code, and never think about servers, instances, or VMs again. Run any web or background process with any web framework or worker type. Scale distributed processes effortlessly with a single command. Easily scale to millions of users. Your comment seems to be defending Heroku, by saying Heroku is lying.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]

zdgman 14y ago

Can we please get this site hosted on Heroku for the irony?

marcamillion 14y ago

Ok this is going too far. Did Heroku make a mistake? Yes. Did they mislead and lie to their customers? Yes. But is it worth pursuing a class action lawsuit that could ultimately ruin them - if not financially, but force their mgmt team to focus on this damn suit rather than fixing the damn problems? Hells no. I hope RapGenius is not the lead plaintiff in this, otherwise I will be very disappointed. I applaud them for raising this issue, and doing all the research they did. We are all much better off for it. I applaud them for sticking to their guns to make sure Heroku fixes the issue. But if they join this class action suit, in my humble opinion, it is one step too far. What is the max they can realistically expect to get back from Heroku? $250K? $500K? Surely not the entire $20K/mo, so I doubt it will be that much. Given all the money they have raised so far, if I were one of their investors I would start to ask questions about if they are wasting their time frivolously beating a dead horse. This is getting into 'bad karma' territory. I am sure someone, at some point, will want to sue RapGenius....they may remember how they behave now. So yes, keep up the pressure, and keep forcing Heroku to fix their faulty systems. But a class action suit dawg? I think not.

redguava 14y ago
They blatantly lied about how a core part of their service worked for years. It was raised to them previously and they didn't change the docs nor the way their system worked. This negatively affected a lot of their customers in many ways (overspending on heroku, time wasted, lost customers and revenue). When Heroku's customers have incurred significant costs and/or losses because of Heroku's false claims, I don't see why this is so inappropriate. We need to make companies accountable for their claims. For context, I am a Heroku customer and have been significantly affected by all of this. I won't participate in the lawsuit but I can understand why others would.
- marcamillion 14y ago
  They didn't "blatantly lie"....they lied. They built their product 1 way and it morphed into another architecture as they grew. They made decisions that optimized for their financial benefit, but I wouldn't go as far as to say they "blatantly lied". Let's not get too carried away here. As a long time Heroku user, I was pissed when I heard this...but they have done so much good for my own development career and freelance gigs, that this is easily forgiveable with a slap on the wrist and a partial refund to customers that have paid a lot over the years. More than likely, they just never realized how big of a deal it was - because they were busy expanding. A few customers (few being relative to their total support requests) probably did inquire and some manager probably developed the response that they are aware of the problem, but not dealing with it right now. It's not as if they built the company on the premise that they are going to say 1 thing and do something else. This is just something that fell through the cracks as they grew. Let's not blow it out of proportion.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

Bradosaur 14y ago

This isn't some grassroots action lead by startup CTOs across the valley. This is just a lawyer searching for a lead plantiff. I find the site rather misleading, and ultimately trashy. (Disclaimer: I am personally opposed to class action lawsuits.)

methodin 14y ago

Do class action lawsuits actually have any effect on business practices? Just seems like an extortion that is somehow legal. No one benefits but the lawyers. Recently I've been included in a bunch unbeknownst to me that require me to submit written notes within a week of notice to NOT be included. Why can't we just eliminate the middleman in these cases to cause real change?

the_cat_kittles 14y ago

Is there a similar service that is better than Heroku that anyone would recommend switching to?

tracker1 14y ago
Depends on your platform... AppFog.com supports a few...

redthrowaway 14y ago

Polemic though this site may be, my understanding of the situation leads me to believe that it makes no false claims. If this is so, Heroku has a problem on its hands: its behaviour is such that it has alienated current customers and, more importantly, dissuaded potential future customers from employing the platform. Heroku's challenges seem threefold: One, they need to get their infrastructure in line with their branding, or vice versa. Two, they need to assuage the doubts of current customers and offer them convincing reasons to stay. Three, their image and reputation have taken a nosedive. I can't see well-informed potential customers considering Heroku without taking this saga into consideration. This would appear to be the most difficult, and the most important, challenge to solve. Heroku needs image rehabilitation in a big way. The only way I can see them achieving that goal is through increased honesty and engagement with their potential customer base. Unfortunately, I haven't seen anything from them that suggests they're adopting that strategy.

jyap 14y ago

Anyone else spot the "I see what you did there?" with the Notes screen shot? http://herokuclassaction.com/how-to-make-heroku-comply-with-its-promises.php http://herokuclassaction.com/how-to-make-heroku-comply-with-... That dig makes it personal.

tubbo 14y ago

are you fucking serious

jwrubel 14y ago

Attorney 'Values' page includes stock photo of corporate jet. Aaaaand we're done here, folks. http://kristensenlaw.com/values.php http://kristensenlaw.com/values.php

uid 14y ago

It is going to be interesting when this gets to discovery, and we find out what Heroku were saying internally this entire time about the issue. There are bound to be internal emails that discuss this issue and what to do (or not to do) about it. For this reason I can see this being settled. Perhaps refunds and an apology.

pg 14y ago

Interestingly, someone tried to spam a bunch of comment threads with this a few days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=herokulawsuit http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=herokulawsuit

NicoJuicy 14y ago

It's to technical... I don't see a reason why you'd win. Lies happen all the time, i saw someone here mention that Heroku didn't knew it was such a big deal. They are expanding a lot, the issue (intelligent routing) has been raised and will be solved. They know what they've done wrong now... They didn't see it as a big issue before. It's up to Heroku to resolve the problem, because at the end of the day it's an issue to be fixed. And don't we see issues all the time in software development. As long as the company itselves communicate about the problem and is honest about it when the problem comes up. That's the only thing i would really care. PS. I'm not associated (employed or client) by Heroku.

mark_l_watson 14y ago

Sorry in advance for being a little off topic here: which VPS hosting companies have the best reputation for automatically restarting your failed VPS (for any reason) from the most recent backup? Many years ago, I was on vacation without an Internet access and my host provider restarted my instance and since I set up my services to start on boot up, all was good. I would guess that I am a typical customer who does not really need fast scalability. I host several web apps with a modest number of users and what I care most about is reliability and then cost.