Last year I tried to talk a customer into using Heroku for a medium size web deployment. They didn't go for it, and so we spent a fair bit of money setting up Elastic Load Balancing, EC2s, etc. Unless you expect a zillion users, it just does not make sense to spend the effort on custom deployments. Same positive comment for using high quality VPS hosting where you can expect your hosting company to do frequent incremental backups, proactively repair RAIDs, get VPS instances back on line quickly after hardware failures, etc.
It is a lot of fun setting up servers but the question is whether that is worth being pulled away from application development. Anyway, good news re: MongoHQ being an add-on product.
It would be really interesting if James could write something on how the company works. It seems like they are only a three people company. But, they got a lot of things done.
We currently have sixteen employees, though that number is growing monthly. I suspect we work like any other young company - what would you like to know?
I'm dying to know more information on the company too. Would be cool to have more blogs posts about the architecture behind Heroku, employees, etc. You guys just dont have to blog about Heroku related stuff :)
i see. i have seen james giving some advices in some YC dinners(summer 09). now, i know that heroku is a 18 people company. everything just makes sense after this.
but, i still wonder how heroku works as a startup from a more engineer perspective, for example, how to get things moving as fast as possible. maybe an engineering related blog like what twitter or facebook have might help.
offtopic: when heroku is going to launch in other regions especially Amazon EC2 just launched in Singapore?
Last year I tried to talk a customer into using Heroku for a medium size web deployment. They didn't go for it, and so we spent a fair bit of money setting up Elastic Load Balancing, EC2s, etc. Unless you expect a zillion users, it just does not make sense to spend the effort on custom deployments. Same positive comment for using high quality VPS hosting where you can expect your hosting company to do frequent incremental backups, proactively repair RAIDs, get VPS instances back on line quickly after hardware failures, etc.
It is a lot of fun setting up servers but the question is whether that is worth being pulled away from application development. Anyway, good news re: MongoHQ being an add-on product.