Re: Heroku on serious applications and lack of support
FWIW, I've done my share of enterprisey stuff. Big name stuff, not in ruby or rails. I am moving more things over to Rails/Ruby on Heroku as I get time to do it. Try dealing with a web farm to host your app, load balancer, data bottlenecks, etc. Then add mysterious machine crashes due to memory issues. Now triple that if its self hosted. No thanks. Don't want to do that anymore if I can avoid it. On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 10:11 PM, Michael Dwan mpd...@gmail.com wrote: I run a few big apps on Heroku that average 2-3 million requests a day with a peak around 30M requests a day. We've used 100 dynos + 8 EC2 machines as part of our system, so I'd call it a real app. Thus far we havent had any issues with Heroku's performance OR support. Compared to some other vendors (such as EY) their support has been awesome and platform rock solid. A few of the Heroku guys even reached out on IM to resolve issues asap, so they make themselves accessible IF you are offsetting the support expense with a paid product. The problem is that the majority of their 80K apps are people running toy apps with a free single dyno who expect immediate assistance then go complain on Twitter when they don't get it. We've never waited more than an hour to get a response for an urgent ticket. Furthermore, we've seen 2 hours of downtime in the past 9 months as a result of Heroku issues. At risk of sounding like a fanboy, Heroku has saved me a huge amount of time and money and will be hosting my apps for the foreseeable future. - Michael Dwan On Sep 16, 7:59 pm, A. M. avenuemag...@gmail.com wrote: Hey - I'm just saying. I like Heroku a lot. Heroku is good for some things - like blogging, simple applications where you want to reach a wide audience. So yea. On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 6:53 PM, Julio Cesar Ody julio...@gmail.com wrote: LOL. Had been a while I hadn't seen a troll that huge. Either that, or my sarcasm meter is impaired. On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 11:52 AM, A. M. avenuemag...@gmail.com wrote: forget about using Heroku and Ruby on Rails for serious applications. If you want serious - go after a language that has very little documentation online - like Python. better yet - go after a language that is enterprise, like Java. On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 2:20 PM, Derek Lei derek...@gmail.com wrote: +1 to Richard's points. On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 1:47 PM, Richard Conroy richard.con...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 9:06 PM, Mike mikel...@gmail.com wrote: Maybe I'm just frustrated right now, what are others' thoughts on this? Well you are at a price point where you can shop around. Nobody does serious comparison between the various Rack based cloud computing offerings, but they are out there, and if anything, the constraints involved in migrating to Heroku make it pretty easy to move off Heroku. There is not much discussion of alternatives, but if I was paying that kind of money and had my services totally locked out for so long, I would be pretty pissed. -- http://richardconroy.blogspot.com|http://twitter.com/RichardConroy -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Heroku group. To post to this group, send email to her...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to heroku+unsubscr...@googlegroups.comheroku%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com heroku%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.comheroku%252bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/heroku?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Heroku group. To post to this group, send email to her...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to heroku+unsubscr...@googlegroups.comheroku%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com heroku%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.comheroku%252bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/heroku?hl=en. -- Artist @ Avenue Magpie -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Heroku group. To post to this group, send email to her...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to heroku+unsubscr...@googlegroups.comheroku%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com heroku%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.comheroku%252bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/heroku?hl=en. -- http://awesomebydesign.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Heroku group. To post to this group, send email to her...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
Re: Heroku on serious applications and lack of support
Same thoughts here. The support request is not as fast as other providers I use. I didn't have critical issue (except for a problem to a primary key of the database, not set correctly during a push, that I solved myself) but I'm a little scared about the fact to stay offline with a slow support response. And yes, I'm a paying customer. On Sep 16, 10:22 pm, Abel Tamayo abel.tam...@gmail.com wrote: Yeah, it can be frustrating some times. I have hope that they will improve in this particular aspect soon though, so I'll stay true to Heroku. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Heroku group. To post to this group, send email to her...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to heroku+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/heroku?hl=en.
Re: Heroku on serious applications and lack of support
It would be nice if Heroku at least offered paid support or at least made their it clear on their website that this is available - much like Engine Yard. We're seriously considering migrating to EY from Heroku at the moment because primarily of the support that is available from EY when it's needed. On Sep 17, 8:44 am, Daniele to...@vitamino.it wrote: Same thoughts here. The support request is not as fast as other providers I use. I didn't have critical issue (except for a problem to a primary key of the database, not set correctly during a push, that I solved myself) but I'm a little scared about the fact to stay offline with a slow support response. And yes, I'm a paying customer. On Sep 16, 10:22 pm, Abel Tamayo abel.tam...@gmail.com wrote: Yeah, it can be frustrating some times. I have hope that they will improve in this particular aspect soon though, so I'll stay true to Heroku. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Heroku group. To post to this group, send email to her...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to heroku+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/heroku?hl=en.
Re: Heroku on serious applications and lack of support
On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 9:10 AM, John Beynon j...@beynon.org.uk wrote: It would be nice if Heroku at least offered paid support or at least made their it clear on their website that this is available - much like Engine Yard. We're seriously considering migrating to EY from Heroku at the moment because primarily of the support that is available from EY when it's needed. That just seems to make some really sound business sense: Provide an option for paid support that is not locked into the size of the app, which seems to be the OPs main problem - his paid app is not spendy enough to warrant higher levels of support. -- http://richardconroy.blogspot.com | http://twitter.com/RichardConroy -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Heroku group. To post to this group, send email to her...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to heroku+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/heroku?hl=en.
Re: Heroku on serious applications and lack of support
They offer a paid support plan with guaranteed response times: We offer ticket-based support for all Heroku users through our zendesk ticket system, Mon-Fri from 6am-6pm PST. If you need specific response times and SLAs, we offer custom packages. Please contact us for more info. From http://docs.heroku.com/faq-accounts-billing#do-you-offer-support On Sep 16, 3:06 pm, Mike mikel...@gmail.com wrote: Are people comfortable with using Heroku on serious applications? If so, how did they come to that decision? I have been developing my application on Heroku for some time now, and I've observed that the support can be really worryingly uneven. I'm running a modest sized app, it's costing me around $150 a month, so at this amount, I know that I can't have dedicated support staff on call whenever I want. However, even when I select My app is unavailable which is presumably their highest level of support, hours can sometimes pass before anyone even gets assigned to my ticket. In my current case, I was upgrading from using Postgres search on my app to Websolr search. To do this, I planned to push as two separate pushes with a migration in between, and their push tool died in the middle of my second push, apparently due to the fact that New Relic was not responding. Now every time I push Heroku is rejecting it saying there is already a slug being compiled, leaving my app in a half-upgraded broken state. It's been like this for hours now, and the support ticket is still awaiting assignment to a help desk operator and there isn't really a single thing I can do to try and improve on the situation. There's nothing I can do to escalate my request, and everything is so abstracted there's no way I can try to fix the problem. Just last month there was another thread by someone whose app was mysteriously stuck in maintenance mode with no one assigned to their support ticket for an entire day. I love how easy Heroku makes it for me to rapidly prototype and develop my app, but it's hard to see how I can stay on it long term with such uneven support. Combine this with the fact that when error messages do come out, and they're terribly unprofessional messages directed towards administrators rather than end users, and I almost feel like they don't even want Heroku to be something that serious applications can use. I submitted a ticket about the error messages when I first saw them like half a year ago, and they said they'd fix them, and they're still like this. Maybe I'm just frustrated right now, what are others' thoughts on this? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Heroku group. To post to this group, send email to her...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to heroku+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/heroku?hl=en.
Re: Heroku on serious applications and lack of support
Wow, sounds like the level of support you're getting for your app is in a whole different world than us mortals with sub-1000 dollar hosting expenditures. Reached out on IM to resolve issues? I couldn't even get them to assign a support person to my app that was down. Well, in some sense that is reassuring, as if/when the project I'm working on gains traction, at least the support will scale up with it apparently. My app ended up being down for a full day, with only one response in the middle of the day where they told me the push should be fixed, but it still wasn't and remained not fixed through the entire night. They should probably make it a little more explicit that their support improves dramatically at higher levels of monthly fee. On Sep 17, 1:10 am, Michael Dwan mpd...@gmail.com wrote: I run a few big apps on Heroku that average 2-3 million requests a day with a peak around 30M requests a day. We've used 100 dynos + 8 EC2 machines as part of our system, so I'd call it a real app. Thus far we havent had any issues with Heroku's performance OR support. Compared to some other vendors (such as EY) their support has been awesome and platform rock solid. A few of the Heroku guys even reached out on IM to resolve issues asap, so they make themselves accessible IF you are offsetting the support expense with a paid product. The problem is that the majority of their 80K apps are people running toy apps with a free single dyno who expect immediate assistance then go complain on Twitter when they don't get it. We've never waited more than an hour to get a response for an urgent ticket. Furthermore, we've seen 2 hours of downtime in the past 9 months as a result of Heroku issues. At risk of sounding like a fanboy, Heroku has saved me a huge amount of time and money and will be hosting my apps for the foreseeable future. - Michael Dwan On Sep 16, 7:59 pm, A. M. avenuemag...@gmail.com wrote: Hey - I'm just saying. I like Heroku a lot. Heroku is good for some things - like blogging, simple applications where you want to reach a wide audience. So yea. On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 6:53 PM, Julio Cesar Ody julio...@gmail.com wrote: LOL. Had been a while I hadn't seen a troll that huge. Either that, or my sarcasm meter is impaired. On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 11:52 AM, A. M. avenuemag...@gmail.com wrote: forget about using Heroku and Ruby on Rails for serious applications. If you want serious - go after a language that has very little documentation online - like Python. better yet - go after a language that is enterprise, like Java. On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 2:20 PM, Derek Lei derek...@gmail.com wrote: +1 to Richard's points. On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 1:47 PM, Richard Conroy richard.con...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 9:06 PM, Mike mikel...@gmail.com wrote: Maybe I'm just frustrated right now, what are others' thoughts on this? Well you are at a price point where you can shop around. Nobody does serious comparison between the various Rack based cloud computing offerings, but they are out there, and if anything, the constraints involved in migrating to Heroku make it pretty easy to move off Heroku. There is not much discussion of alternatives, but if I was paying that kind of money and had my services totally locked out for so long, I would be pretty pissed. -- http://richardconroy.blogspot.com|http://twitter.com/RichardConroy -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Heroku group. To post to this group, send email to her...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to heroku+unsubscr...@googlegroups.comheroku%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/heroku?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Heroku group. To post to this group, send email to her...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to heroku+unsubscr...@googlegroups.comheroku%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/heroku?hl=en. -- Artist @ Avenue Magpie -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Heroku group. To post to this group, send email to her...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to heroku+unsubscr...@googlegroups.comheroku%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/heroku?hl=en. -- http://awesomebydesign.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Heroku group. To post to this group, send email to her...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email
Re: Heroku on serious applications and lack of support
Does anyone have experience with this? It'd be really interesting to find out what you get and for what ballpark figure. On Sep 17, 8:13 am, Chap chapambr...@gmail.com wrote: They offer a paid support plan with guaranteed response times: We offer ticket-based support for all Heroku users through our zendesk ticket system, Mon-Fri from 6am-6pm PST. If you need specific response times and SLAs, we offer custom packages. Please contact us for more info. Fromhttp://docs.heroku.com/faq-accounts-billing#do-you-offer-support On Sep 16, 3:06 pm, Mike mikel...@gmail.com wrote: Are people comfortable with using Heroku on serious applications? If so, how did they come to that decision? I have been developing my application on Heroku for some time now, and I've observed that the support can be really worryingly uneven. I'm running a modest sized app, it's costing me around $150 a month, so at this amount, I know that I can't have dedicated support staff on call whenever I want. However, even when I select My app is unavailable which is presumably their highest level of support, hours can sometimes pass before anyone even gets assigned to my ticket. In my current case, I was upgrading from using Postgres search on my app to Websolr search. To do this, I planned to push as two separate pushes with a migration in between, and their push tool died in the middle of my second push, apparently due to the fact that New Relic was not responding. Now every time I push Heroku is rejecting it saying there is already a slug being compiled, leaving my app in a half-upgraded broken state. It's been like this for hours now, and the support ticket is still awaiting assignment to a help desk operator and there isn't really a single thing I can do to try and improve on the situation. There's nothing I can do to escalate my request, and everything is so abstracted there's no way I can try to fix the problem. Just last month there was another thread by someone whose app was mysteriously stuck in maintenance mode with no one assigned to their support ticket for an entire day. I love how easy Heroku makes it for me to rapidly prototype and develop my app, but it's hard to see how I can stay on it long term with such uneven support. Combine this with the fact that when error messages do come out, and they're terribly unprofessional messages directed towards administrators rather than end users, and I almost feel like they don't even want Heroku to be something that serious applications can use. I submitted a ticket about the error messages when I first saw them like half a year ago, and they said they'd fix them, and they're still like this. Maybe I'm just frustrated right now, what are others' thoughts on this? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Heroku group. To post to this group, send email to her...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to heroku+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/heroku?hl=en.
Re: Heroku on serious applications and lack of support
Honestly I agree with Mike 100%. The right thing for Heroku to do is to have their economics be more transparent. As fellow developers, i do not think we expect 100% service, esp if we are running a single dyno and a toy app. But personally, (i spend 2K on amazon a month), and i need to feel confident that if i scale up, the heroku support will do so as well. Btw, people who dun pay anything, and run to Twitter to complain when it is their own fault 90% of the time are buffoons. M On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 8:08 AM, Mike mikel...@gmail.com wrote: Wow, sounds like the level of support you're getting for your app is in a whole different world than us mortals with sub-1000 dollar hosting expenditures. Reached out on IM to resolve issues? I couldn't even get them to assign a support person to my app that was down. Well, in some sense that is reassuring, as if/when the project I'm working on gains traction, at least the support will scale up with it apparently. My app ended up being down for a full day, with only one response in the middle of the day where they told me the push should be fixed, but it still wasn't and remained not fixed through the entire night. They should probably make it a little more explicit that their support improves dramatically at higher levels of monthly fee. On Sep 17, 1:10 am, Michael Dwan mpd...@gmail.com wrote: I run a few big apps on Heroku that average 2-3 million requests a day with a peak around 30M requests a day. We've used 100 dynos + 8 EC2 machines as part of our system, so I'd call it a real app. Thus far we havent had any issues with Heroku's performance OR support. Compared to some other vendors (such as EY) their support has been awesome and platform rock solid. A few of the Heroku guys even reached out on IM to resolve issues asap, so they make themselves accessible IF you are offsetting the support expense with a paid product. The problem is that the majority of their 80K apps are people running toy apps with a free single dyno who expect immediate assistance then go complain on Twitter when they don't get it. We've never waited more than an hour to get a response for an urgent ticket. Furthermore, we've seen 2 hours of downtime in the past 9 months as a result of Heroku issues. At risk of sounding like a fanboy, Heroku has saved me a huge amount of time and money and will be hosting my apps for the foreseeable future. - Michael Dwan On Sep 16, 7:59 pm, A. M. avenuemag...@gmail.com wrote: Hey - I'm just saying. I like Heroku a lot. Heroku is good for some things - like blogging, simple applications where you want to reach a wide audience. So yea. On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 6:53 PM, Julio Cesar Ody julio...@gmail.com wrote: LOL. Had been a while I hadn't seen a troll that huge. Either that, or my sarcasm meter is impaired. On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 11:52 AM, A. M. avenuemag...@gmail.com wrote: forget about using Heroku and Ruby on Rails for serious applications. If you want serious - go after a language that has very little documentation online - like Python. better yet - go after a language that is enterprise, like Java. On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 2:20 PM, Derek Lei derek...@gmail.com wrote: +1 to Richard's points. On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 1:47 PM, Richard Conroy richard.con...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 9:06 PM, Mike mikel...@gmail.com wrote: Maybe I'm just frustrated right now, what are others' thoughts on this? Well you are at a price point where you can shop around. Nobody does serious comparison between the various Rack based cloud computing offerings, but they are out there, and if anything, the constraints involved in migrating to Heroku make it pretty easy to move off Heroku. There is not much discussion of alternatives, but if I was paying that kind of money and had my services totally locked out for so long, I would be pretty pissed. -- http://richardconroy.blogspot.com| http://twitter.com/RichardConroy -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Heroku group. To post to this group, send email to her...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to heroku+unsubscr...@googlegroups.comheroku%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com heroku%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.comheroku%252bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/heroku?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Heroku group. To post to this group, send email to her...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to heroku+unsubscr...@googlegroups.comheroku%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com
Re: Custom error pages, we *really* need them
+1 for iframe/javascript solution I feel like the same system could be used to improve the custom maintenance mode page as well. I tested it out on my staging app the other day, and it took 15 minutes before the ugly default page was replaced by my custom page. Thats just too long! My biggest downtime for a production migration so far downtime is less than 5 minutes, which means nobody will ever see my custom page. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Heroku group. To post to this group, send email to her...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to heroku+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/heroku?hl=en.
*promises to be quiet until i get to know Heroku better* eom
-- Artist @ Avenue Magpie -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Heroku group. To post to this group, send email to her...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to heroku+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/heroku?hl=en.
