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Heroku is our genie in a bottle.
June 04, 2014

Heroku is our genie in a bottle.

Leigh Wetmore | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Heroku

We are a mobile data collection company. We host the server component of our application and our customer data through Heroku and its plug-ins. As such, it is the technological backbone of our company. As we are a small company, we do not have sufficient resources to manage our own server infrastructure - Heroku fills this role nicely. It allows us to easily scale our resources, up or down, to meet customer demand. It offers plug-ins that help expose the issues customers are having, and help gather and report metrics for determination of ROI.
  • Very low (or no) cost initially for full functionality. Great for a start-up.
  • Highly scalable. Adding computing power to an environment, or creating a new one, takes seconds.
  • Plug-ins. A wide variety of plug-ins exist for a variety of purposes: data storage, error reporting/logging, metrics gathering, backup and many more.
  • Simple. Get up and running in a couple of hours. Documentation is available for all tasks.
  • Seamless integration with Git, a quick Git push and your server is updated instantly.
  • Heroku does not support .NET, only Ruby, Java, Node.js, Python and a few others
  • Heroku can get very expensive if very powerful hardware is required. Not all plug-ins are free; the monthly cost can easily creep up.
  • The potential for downtime increases as more plug-ins are used, if you're not careful in how you bring everything together.
  • Heroku seamlessly connects you to the plug-ins you use via user accounts for those plug-ins' web sites; however in some cases, such as Mongo HQ, Heroku creates the account for you and it can be difficult to gain access to the plug-in directly if needed.
  • Increased employee efficiency. There is no IT infrastructure on site that must be managed. Rolling out new servers for customers is nearly instantaneous. Plug-ins supply functionality that might otherwise have to be manually built. Changes can be pushed to server code in seconds to address immediate customer concerns.
  • Faster path to proof-of-concept. As a start-up, it is critical to be up and running with a product as quickly as possible.
  • Increased responsiveness to customer issues. Plug-ins provide insight into problems, and seamless Git integration facilitates a timely fix.
  • Faster customer on-boarding. Customer trials are up and running in literally minutes.
Heroku is a critical and core part of our infrastructure that is serving our customers well. We are very satisfied with the cost of our solution. While it would be difficult to move away from Heroku, we have no plans to do so. We have had no major issues with it and it is a pleasure to use. Other products on the market might offer comparable functionality, but until we expose a need that Heroku cannot satisfy, we'll stay the course.
Heroku is well-suited to companies who:
- can't afford their own IT infrastructure, or whom have no interest in the time overhead associated with managing it
- have a business that requires a high level of agility or responsiveness (e.g., quickly signing up a new customer who requires a silo'ed environment)
- work with Ruby, Node.js, Python or Java server components, and use Git for version control