Heroku for Facebook Developers | Hacker News Reader

Heroku for Facebook Developers

heroku.com

36 pointsph0rque9 comments

I haven't had to manage a site at that traffic level before, but is there really a use case where you're immediately going from no managed hosting to needing $1500/month in managed hosting?

I don't doubt these are the resources necessary for a 1M user site and I don't even doubt that that's a good deal for not having to manage a site of such scale, but how many people are $1500/month ready to test an idea?

Ad agencies are a good example. They put together a cheesy game as part of a campaign, and need to hit the ground running. Relative to development, creative, and everything else that goes into a campaign, $1,500/mo is a steal.

I work at one, and you'd have to make a really good case to a client to factor in $1,500 / month in hosting costs. Even though it's a small sum compared to total campaign spend, big companies are more into the "wow" factor than anything else. Thus they're more willing to pay for cool designs than that boring hosting stuff.

Also, support is extremely important for these big campaigns. Companies want someone to call if things go awry. If Heroku goes down, you're kinda screwed. All we can tell the client is "sorry, Heroku's down. we can't do anything about that." That's something you want to avoid.

Over the last 2 years, I've built a number of Facebook apps.

For the ones that go big, they go big fast!

When we started out our business in 2008, we needed to double our capacity every week for 6 weeks. I spent a lot of time adding servers and moving providers as our old one couldn't move fast enough.

Heroku is in general too expensive for me.

Personally I would go for an AWS Free Tier account + 1 EC2 large instance. Then use the micro instance as the HTTP server, and the large instance for the DB and a 1 GB memcached.

That would cost no more than $100 / month and will give you more processing power than what this package offers.

It's interesting to me that heroku chose to showcase a realtime app (Clobby) as an example of what they do well. Don't get me wrong, I think heroku works very well in some use cases, but I'm really curious how to get access to the "specialized addons" that enable this behavior, as the heroku I'm familiar with doesn't play well with websockets/comet.

I'm not sure this would appeal to "developers" at $1500 per month. Perhaps the CTO of a funded businesses. I was half expecting something in the price range of a mortal individual developer/entrepreneur.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com