I think you're exaggerating / misinformed. I'm a heroku customer, and I dealt with the pain of this outage earlier this week.
status.heroku.com had all the info about it. If you want more detail you can just submit a request to support, which I did, and after which I got some more info.
I'd hardly say they 'hid' their problems, they fessed up to them. I'd give them a solid B- on communication skills on status.heroku.com. If you message support they'll actually give you more detail, but really, that stuff should just be put on status.heroku.com.
Compared to a lot of other hosts I've dealt with they're pretty good (some colos don't even have a status site). They do, however, need to be more verbose. Customers need to know what happened and be told what's being done about it so it won't happen again.
At any rate, the only comparable product out there is EY Cloud, and I wouldn't say their support is any better / worse, and you actually have to pay EY for real support.
Don't base it off this one angry guy. This kind of thing happens extremely rarely, and their support team is top notch. Aside from that the ease in setup, scalability and supported add-ons make for a very pleasurable deployment
Am I the only one that found this article poorly researched and misleading? It mentioned that using "cloud servers" lets you quickly fix bugs, rather than having to "rebuild" your code before you fix the bugs. How does that have anything to do with cloud services? Secondly, I'd like to know how many of the apps that Heroku hosts are actually production apps. I know I host at least 15 apps on Heroku, but all of them don't have any paid addons, they have one dyno, and none of them are actually the production server for the application.
Secondly, I'd like to know how many of the apps that Heroku hosts are actually production apps.
Agreed. Because of Heroku's unreasonable pricing, I see it as a feasible service only for staging and development. Without deep pockets, I would never want to host a potentially popular app on Heroku since I could never afford to scale it there. And because I don't want to have to go to the trouble of reengineering something after it's been developed to move it elsewhere, I would rather build it elsewhere from the start.
What about how heroku is designed would require re-engineering if you move it elsewhere?
Rails + SQL + Memcached = the most standard stack you can build, aside from the fact that they use Postgres. Most of the addons aren't too hard to setup oneself either.
I just migrated one of my applications to Heroku yesterday... So far I've been very happy with it! I only needed to change one line of application code and remove my old config files to get everything working.
The interesting part for me is that with aggressive caching I can run my application(s) on their free service with very few hassles. That's great for me as it gives me the chance to spend the money on advertising instead of hosting, where I'll actually see a return.
Hopefully sometime down the line I can start paying for the service to thank Heroku for their awesome work!
