3 ms·

I find the non-free options no Heroku to be vastly more expensive than hosting options elsewhere such as Slicehost, Dreamhost and Amazon ECS. They provide a va

by boggles 17y ago

I find the non-free options no Heroku to be vastly more expensive than hosting options elsewhere such as Slicehost, Dreamhost and Amazon ECS. They provide a valuable service in terms of taking administration issues out of the picture and letting you just focus on developing your app. But my feeling is this is not targeted at hackers who are surviving on rice and beans but rather those who are more likely to either have well-paying day jobs that can subsidize their startup hobby on the side or have enough VC capital to not bother with the mundane details of hosting administration and its associated time and financial burdens. Not that there's anything wrong with that - Heroku has come up with an ingenious business model because it really does satisfy a need in the vanity hosting market where cost is not an issue - but belonging to the rice and beans category myself at the moment, I just find that I'm sadly not their target demographic - as much fun as it is to use Heroku's free option for little toy apps. Deploying to Heroku really is a delight and I think we will see more services like them start up over the next few years.

wr0ngway 17y ago
If you are looking for a free tool for rails deployment, check out my project http://wiki.github.com/wr0ngway/rubber http://wiki.github.com/wr0ngway/rubber (The Quick Start section gives a good feel for it) - while the EC2 account isn't free, its not too bad, especially if you aren't running a full time instance. I've also done some abstracting out of the ec2 bits, so theoretically you could write a slicehost/other adapter if you were so inclined.
- boggles 17y ago
  This is cool. How much tinkering would it take to use this for Sinatra deployments to EC2?
  - wr0ngway 17y ago
    Not much, that was one of my focuses in the current release as we needed to deploy a sinatra app. I think the only thing that missed the release was generating a Rakefile into the project root for non-rails projects. Here's what ours looks like: http://gist.github.com/189256 http://gist.github.com/189256 Ping me on the rubber mailing list if you have any questions - I'd be interested in hearing how this works out for a non-rails app for someone other than myself :)
patio11 17y ago
well-paying day jobs that can subsidize their startup hobby on the side My well-paying hobby subsidizes the day job at the moment. ;) Seriously though: if you're charging money for whatever you're selling, servers via any of the above methods are dirt cheap. Its not quite on the same level as "economize on what brand of pens I use", but it would be impossible for me to meaningfully affect my life via switching hosting providers, whereas it is very possible to meaningfully effect my life via doing productive work on the business. Accordingly, I suggest optimizing for whatever provider or system gets you back to solving problems for your paying customers. (I use Slicehost, for what it is worth.)

by boggles 17y ago

wr0ngway 17y ago

If you are looking for a free tool for rails deployment, check out my project http://wiki.github.com/wr0ngway/rubber http://wiki.github.com/wr0ngway/rubber (The Quick Start section gives a good feel for it) - while the EC2 account isn't free, its not too bad, especially if you aren't running a full time instance. I've also done some abstracting out of the ec2 bits, so theoretically you could write a slicehost/other adapter if you were so inclined.

boggles 17y ago
This is cool. How much tinkering would it take to use this for Sinatra deployments to EC2?
- wr0ngway 17y ago
  Not much, that was one of my focuses in the current release as we needed to deploy a sinatra app. I think the only thing that missed the release was generating a Rakefile into the project root for non-rails projects. Here's what ours looks like: http://gist.github.com/189256 http://gist.github.com/189256 Ping me on the rubber mailing list if you have any questions - I'd be interested in hearing how this works out for a non-rails app for someone other than myself :)

patio11 17y ago

well-paying day jobs that can subsidize their startup hobby on the side My well-paying hobby subsidizes the day job at the moment. ;) Seriously though: if you're charging money for whatever you're selling, servers via any of the above methods are dirt cheap. Its not quite on the same level as "economize on what brand of pens I use", but it would be impossible for me to meaningfully affect my life via switching hosting providers, whereas it is very possible to meaningfully effect my life via doing productive work on the business. Accordingly, I suggest optimizing for whatever provider or system gets you back to solving problems for your paying customers. (I use Slicehost, for what it is worth.)