Overall Satisfaction with Heroku
We use Heroku as part of our hosting for our SaaS business. It is not the only web host we use, but for Ruby on Rails web apps that we want to be able to deploy quickly, it is a great solution. Whether or not projects stay on Heroku long term, new projects always start using it. Developers love how easy it is for them to deploy to, and how easy it is to deploy review apps to create multiple staging environments.
- Ease of configuration and scaling.
- Ease of code deployment.
- Ease of deploying staging environments.
- An ephemeral file system may require workarounds certain developers are not used to.
- The cost is high and can easily balloon as you grow if you aren't careful.
- While configuration is super simple, it will not be as flexible as bare metal servers.
- Starting fast and deploying new ideas the same day.
- Initial launch and MVP testing without worrying about DevOps.
- Developers can prioritize features and don't have to worry about DevOps work in new and growing projects.
We also use Cloud 66 which provides some of Heroku's features, at a lower price. It still cannot compare to Heroku's ease of use and ability to easily deploy new staging environments though, so we will always use Heroku for at least some of our projects.