Heroku is a cloud platorm as a service (PaaS) that supports many programming languages. Formed in 2007 and owned by SalesForce.com, Heroku has support for Ruby,Java, Node.js, Scala, Clojure and Python and PHP. Heroku's operates on Debian and Debian-based Ubuntu.
Review
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Sales
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Pre-sales questions are taken by phone and through an online contact form. Telephone support can be difficult to reach as the number is only staffed on weekdays during business hours. I did leave a voicemail with Heroku, but never heard back. I filled out the form on Heroku’s website with a few sales questions on a Monday morning and received a response two days later. The answers I received were thorough and polite. Heroku does have a fantastic collection of documentation and tutorials on their website, as well, both of which go a long way in answering typical sales questions.
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Setup
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Account setup is a breeze. First, you enter your email address into an online form, and then you must confirm that address. After that, choose a password, and you’re in. Just like that! From the Heroku Dashboard you can then download the Heroku Toolbelt to interact with your hosting account, deploy an app, learn a few things at the Heroku Dev Center, add apps, and more. Thanks to thorough documentation and help files, getting started with Heroku is easy as can be.
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Billing
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Heroku accepts all major credit cards. The billing department is available for assistance through the online ticket system. I did have reason to contact billing once because my account statement was believed to be inaccurate. I filed a trouble ticket and then waited for a response. It took a full four days for Heroku to get back to me, but they did sort out the matter immediately when it was brought to their attention. It’s a slow process, but billing is willing to admit their mistakes and correct things. Also, account cancellation is as easy as clicking a link in the Heroku Dashboard.
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Pricing
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Heroku charges for your instance’s CPU time, instead of RAM usage, as some other hosts do. This makes it easier to predict pricing. You pay on-demand, of course. Web dynos, which run your code and respond to HTTP requests, cost $.05/hour and worker dynos which execute background jobs are also $.05 an hour. Starter databases are free, basic databases are $9, and production databases start at $50 and come with 400 mb of RAM. Heroku is affordable and easily scalable.
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Reliability
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Heroku was unbeatably reliable during a two-year period. My uptime was 99.98% and I had nary a hiccup to worry about.
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Help & Support
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Heroku falls slightly short on support, at least compared with other hosts in their category. For starters, their support ticket system feel antiquated. Before filing a ticket, you must first query their knowledgebase. If your answer is not found in their FAQs, you are then allowed to contact Heroku. Clients also have access to the Heroku StackOverflow community. Ironically, that’s really the only live support available. Support is good and also quick to act, but getting to support is somewhat of a hassle.
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Uptime
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Heroku maintained a 99.98% uptime rating over a two-year period.
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Guarantee
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Terms of Service
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The Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy can be read in full online. Highlights include:
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No hate or violent content allowed.
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No gambling content permitted.
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Strict anti-spam policy.
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No illegal files, including peer-to-peer sharing.
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Bottom Line
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Advantages
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Extreme scalability.
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Excellent performance.
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Rapid application deployment.
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Tight Git integration.
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Wealth of developer tools and add-ons.
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Predictable pricing.
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Compatible with nearly all languages.
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Good documentation and tutorials.
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Easy-to-use.
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Disadvantages
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No phone or live chat support.
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True 24/7 support (business certified) costs money.
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Limited to PostgresSQL.
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Databases are bound to a single stack and can’t be shared across apps.
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