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These two services behave so differently, it's hard to do a real cost breakdown. It depends on your app. Here are some issues with comparisons between EY and He
by andrewvc 17y ago
These two services behave so differently, it's hard to do a real cost breakdown. It depends on your app. Here are some issues with comparisons between EY and Heroku (I'm leaving Joyent out because I have no experience with them):
1. There's no reason to believe that 6 mongrels on an EY small EC2 instance == 6 thins on whatever EC2 size Heroku is using. They need to be benchmarked.
2. DB Performance needs to be benchmarked. EY uses MySQL, Heroku uses Postgres or Amazon RDS (MySQL). I've heard that their postgres db is substantially faster than RDS.
3. Heroku gives you varnish, and it doesn't cost you any dynos. If you can use cache control headers, varnish is your friend. On EY you'll likely use Rack::Cache, which is fine, but it hits a mongrel. Heroku also does gzip and SSL before it hits your server, also saving you cycles.
4. App server redundancy with EY is expensive since you need a whole other small EC2 instance, with Heroku all your dynos are spread out.
5. If you want instant database failover (using MySQL replication), this is a extremely easy on EY, with Heroku it takes more work, you have to launch your own RDS instances. Of course, a small RDS instance is only $80/mo, beating EY and Heroku's DB offerings on price. RDS will have replication soon, probably at a lower price than EY. Of course, neither EY and Heroku haven't to my knowledge announced plans to drop their prices in November when amazon drops their EC2 prices by 15%. This would make both more competitive vs RDS.
6. EY likely has a better economy of scale, a 5ECU EY instance ($197 vs $125 for a 1ECU small) is probably more cost effective for CPU heavy requests than Heroku Dynos.
7. EY support ain't free. Keep in mind that EY support and monitoring are only there if you pay major extra $ on top of your infrastructure. It can easily nearly double your costs depending on your plan.
The cost of either one really will vary depending on which features you use heavily.