This is going to be blatant praise of Heroku, but I have good reason. I’ve been doing development for a long time now. I’ve done client-server stuff in many forms for almost all of that time, and I’m including web development in that. When it comes to hosting your app, you have some common scenarios to choose from. I’ll list them.
- self hosted server
- self managed data center
- rented rack space
- slice hosting
- shared hosting
- and the current techo-pop.. cloud hosted
I’ve done some for of all except slice hosting. Not an expert, but I’ve learned a couple things. First, there are positives and negatives for each. One thing that gets forgotten is that your hosting choice impacts your technology choices, and vice versa.
It’s less of an impact when you self host or self manage a data center, but there’s a big cost plus in money and maintenance. Obviously, the smaller the hosting package, the cheaper it is and the more limited the performance and storage space. That’s where cloud based hosting comes in. It’s an attempt to let you scale more easily, but development choices get more limited and deployment can be a pain.
That’s not true with Heroku though.
Time out. ..I’m prompted to posted this because of a specific situation. I have a shared hosting account which I want to use to test out small projects we’re working on. The problem is its run under Medium Trust (.Net term if you don’t know). It uses the Spark view engine, so that means it has to precompile the views. That hasn’t gone well. The hosting choice, while economical, has also caused significant development pain to try to get the chose platform to work. Not fun at all actually.
Time back in.. This is where Heroku excels. It’s a cloud hosting service, and deployment is dead simple. You just use git to push your rails app up. You can start with a free account and then buy the appropriate service level from there. Manage your scale, add extra services or features, integrate with Amazon services. It’s all just plain simple. Now I know from the discussion group, that its not perfect all the time. Everything I see is that its quite reliable, and the team certainly is very responsive.
If you are building a rails app.. don’t think, just deploy to Heroku. No stress; should just work. I’d recommend it to any rails shop. ..I’d recommend it to non-rails shops using rails in any way. You don’t get bound into the specific SDK requirements of Google or Microsoft Azure. Even Amazon EC2 has its technical reqs. In just my casual checks, it looks like their pricing is more than competitive too.
I honestly consider Heroku to be a visionary achievement. I don’t think there was anything quite like it when they popped up, and I’m not sure there is yet. A team of devs decided they wanted a scalable rails hosting solution with easy depployment – something that is still a challenge with rails apps in many places – so they built one. How much easier can something be than checking in your files to a repository?
Great job guys!! To all the rails hacks or pros, just go check it out.
Update: I view Heroku as one of the reasons consider using rails.