CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsruby-on-rails-3heroku
sscirrus
sscirrus

Reputation: 56719

Is Heroku dependable?

I have been hosting a site on Heroku for a few months that is very soon to go into production.

Since I began with them, there have been at least three significant outages, one of which was the disastrous Amazon outage last month and another of which is a multi-hour outage happening today.

I believe in Heroku's vision and I think they are a great company, but I am faced with the ultimate problem: if they can't keep sites up and running, everything I like about them doesn't really matter.

Is Heroku a reliable provider to run a production site on Rails?

Are there any other providers I might look into that have a better reputation for reliability than Heroku?

Upvotes: 13

Views: 2515

Answers (7)

Dani
Dani

Reputation: 1250

In my org i build simple SPA productivity apps, and have been using Heroku to host them for the last year after migrating away from a physical box server to cloud VMs.

I've had multiple days lost due to Heroku development hindering outages. Usually while running apps stay online, and work, when Heroku goes down you can't push updates or restart apps.

Lets also not forget the ridiculous times for scheduled maintenance (usually 2PM EST, midweek....REALLY?)

As of writing this, the Logging system for Heroku has now been acting up (more or less down) for over 24 hour.

Thankfully my apps aren't mission critical. While I like Heroku's ease of use, it's just not worth this much headache for what is nothing other than an AWS middle-man.

That said, I'm moving over to just pure AWS EC2 instances.

Upvotes: 0

user3551178
user3551178

Reputation: 21

Our our app is hosted by Heroku and went down mutliple times over the last 12 months.

Two times it was caused by one of the third-party apps that Heroku offers:

  1. We used Zerigo (recommended by Heroku) for our DNS. This has caused our site to go down twice - one time it took over 12 hours te recover. This is absolutely crazy for something like DNS, so we have switched to a more reliable provider.

  2. The Redistogo app went down once.

Heroku does bring some benefits, but be careful about the apps you select.

Upvotes: 2

rmontgomery429
rmontgomery429

Reputation: 14850

No. It is not. As a customer I've experienced multiple critical outages. These things happen and I get that. But what makes Heroku unreliable is their nearly non-existent support when things do go wrong. I would use caution when evaluating Heroku or any provider for that matter and really understand what you're paying for. Paying as much as I did for Heroku I expected more.

As an example one of their databases went offline early on a Sunday. I immediately was made aware, not from Heroku but from our customers and new relic alerts. I contacted Heroku support just to get the ball rolling as I began to troubleshoot. 24 hours later I had literally no responses from Heroku. I could not fork, follow, or take snapshot of the database as they suggest (because they were experiencing issues) so I basically sat on my hand and waited. Hoping that somebody would respond as I frantically attempt to recover somehow, someway.

Was this their fault. No. Not at all. I should/could have done something to mitigate this failure. But as much as I pay for their servies each month I expected something resembling a response to my critical issue.

Upvotes: 2

Heroku_User
Heroku_User

Reputation: 81

I am user of Heroku with Amazon RDS plugin for the past 7-8 months and my conclusion is there is nothing to appreciate about Heroku except their architecture. Here is why I think:

  1. Even though it is sold for $250 million+ they were still NOT using the Amazon multiple zones feature of Amazon. Below is the link how SmugMug survived amazon crash by using Amazon's multiple zones feature. http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2011/04/24/how-smugmug-survived-the-amazonpocalypse/
  2. No phone contact support in the event of issues (not application but Heroku's), lot to learn from Rackspace
  3. The application I am hosting, people will starve if it goes down for few hours on Friday forget about 60 hours downtime.
  4. I see intermittent deployment and connectivity issues. Please visit this link for a confirmation: http://status.heroku.com/

I know developers love it because they throw a cheap web process called 'dyno' for free.

Upvotes: 8

Tam
Tam

Reputation: 12042

I have seem Heroku to be reliable. I highly recommended it for starting out and validating your idea. I believe when you start your project you want get it out quickly (to customer or to public).

As mentioned in other comments at some point you might need to switch over to EC2 as you might need zone redundancy and it might actually become cheaper to run of EC2 especially if you already have an SA in the company.

Upvotes: 2

Reed G. Law
Reed G. Law

Reputation: 3945

So far Heroku does not offer multiple availability zone redundancy. If you want something more reliable than Heroku you can create your own EC2 instances in multiple availability zones. Of course this will require significantly more server upkeep, admin, and deployment time.

Upvotes: 6

Aditya Sanghi
Aditya Sanghi

Reputation: 13433

In my opinion, downtime can happen with almost any provider. What you need to see is how well or badly the host handles the downtime and the effort they make in keeping the customer updated about possible resolution.

In my opinion Heroku is a great place to host your app. The advantages and ease of deploying there covers up for the recent (and rare) downtime FOR ME.

Upvotes: 9

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