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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

By now, you deploy Ruby applications in the same way you deploy PHP applications, for the most part. We've come a long way since a few years ago. An Apache + passenger setup looks basically the same as Apache + mod_php.

Here's the secret sauce of Heroku: I know how to set up servers. I don't want to.

Paying for convenience is always a good business model.

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>Here's the secret sauce of Heroku: I know how to set up servers. I don't want to. >Paying for convenience is always a good business model.

This.

I really wish that the Pantheon folks would scale up and open up their platform to generic PHP apps. It's everything I want setup and ready to go: Varnish, Apache, MariaDB, PHP5 APC, Memcached, Solr, Hudson all on one box, configured for dev, staging and prod environments, and managed via git and Hudson for deployments and automation.

https://getpantheon.com/about

Edit: Forgot to add that the best part about the Pantheon service is that while you can use it as a total SaaS like Heroku, it's also 100% hackable, you have root on the box, and can change anything that you want to, quite an amazing idea (have to see how their support issues pan out).

Just wondering, how much control do you have over configuration settings for Heroku?

I imagine you could save a lot of money by optimizing apache/mysql rather than using the default configuration Heroku sets.

You don't get a ton of control. And yeah, you could save some money by setting up your own servers and fine-tuning them just the way you want to.

But I don't want to. Like Steve above, I can set up a server, but I really don't want to deal with that stuff. Heroku's value-add to me is that my time is better spent on being a software engineer than being an ops engineer. That value-add is worth the extra money.

Basically none, and I like it that way. You know why?

> I imagine you could save a lot of money by optimizing apache/mysql rather than using the default configuration Heroku sets.

I really doubt this, that's why. Their entire life is making reliable systems for applications. Mine isn't. They know waaaaay more about this than I do.

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