VPS and Dedicated Servers certainly work and are usually going to be more economical, but then you are going to have to deal with all of the setup/maintenance tasks that Heroku abstracts away from you.
I'd venture that there are far more people using Heroku for its easy deployment and management than its ability to scale quickly and easily.
>I'd venture that there are far more people using Heroku for its easy deployment and management than its ability to scale quickly and easily.
That's well and good but I wouldn't be so quick to pass off on dedicated. A simple 50-100 line fabric script that takes 30 minutes to write can manage your custom deployment for you. And guess what, your next project will be even easier to deploy because of that same script.
If the only reason to use Heroku or other of its kind is easy deployment - maybe we just need better deployment apps that can work seamlessly across servers.
> If the only reason to use Heroku or other of its kind is easy deployment - maybe we just need better deployment apps that can work seamlessly across servers.
Heroku certainly thought so. That's why they got a few dozen brilliant programmers into the same building and made it happen.
Of course, with a ~$5M/year burn rate, it's probably also why they charge money for their services.
(making up numbers here, but assume 30 developers at $150K => ~$4.5M so I would guess I'm laughably low)
How is OVH for actually serving websites? I use a 8G dedicated server for a seedbox and PLEX. The servers in France were really bad for me in the US. But I just switched to the datacenter in Canada and it is working well.
But I am still weary about using them for anything serious. I thought they were just for bittorrent.
Using them just for bit-torrent is actually against the TOS/AUP unless it is completely legal. For their French/UK datacenters they don't care about torrenting, for their Canadian datacenter they have been coming down harsh on those people I know that were using them as seedboxes for copyright material.
As for actual hosting? They are fast, have plenty of banwidth, and I am able to saturate my home cable link (Comcast in Colorado) using my service located in their Canadian datacenter.
Ping times aren't that fantastic, but for most of what I serve up it isn't an issue that the connection took 50 ms to set up, rather than the 35 ms from a US based host (Although a lot of that comes down to the extremely poor routing choices that Level 3 seems to be making on my way to Canada.)
What I have noticed is that my European visitors are happier, from across the ocean to OVH's BHS datacenter is about 90 msec, whereas from there to my server at Softlayer (Dallas, TX) that easily goes up to 150 msec.
A few of my sites that are heavier load, or require more static assets that can easily be cached have Cloudflare thrown in front of the static asset part. So the web app/dynamic content is served from the server itself, and the static content is on a secondary domain that is set to Cloudflare.
It hosts email, various domains, static, non-static, Python, Ruby, Postgres, MySQL ... and I don't pay a cent more for each of those services.
One of the sites I host on there has been Reddited and it didn't even break a sweat...