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Scroll to end to see detailed updates, in brief:
Update 1 – Heroku respond to EngineYard’s e-mail
Update 2 – EngineYard Co-Founder Tom Mornini tweeted about the tone of sales rep’s e-mail
I’m getting bored of Joyent’s shared accelerator manual mongrel restarts so I’m considering switching hosts, plus one of their employees totally wasted my time after they contacted me on twitter out of the blue – I know most Joyent customers have a good relationship with them, unluckily and I expect uncharacteristically I’ve only had an average experience with them.
Anyway, so the candidates were Heroku and EngineYard Cloud. Heroku is very unlikely due to their $100 per month full on SSL costs. After I posted a comment about this on RubyInside, an EngineYard rep sent me the following email:
Hi Eliot,
You should also know Engine Yard Cloud comes up to 40% cheaper than Heroku. We deliver a better solution with a much easier INCLUDED SSL service.
Not to mention with Heroku you are relying on their multi-tenant architecture (their app goes down so does your app) – not the case with Engine Yard. In addition to having a more secure environment, and save cost, our dashboard is built on a battle tested Rails Stack for the last 3 years.
Also here’s some information on further details:
Our cloud dashboard allows you to easily create and manage an infrastructure for deploying rails applications.
You can easily deploy rails applications and all their dependencies including any gems from any git repository via the dashboard UI or from the command line with a special git commit message.
Heroku doesn’t offer support or monitoring. – Our cloud dashboard allows you to easily create and manage an infrastructure for deploying rails applications. We ping your site every two minutes and manage alerts that are sent directly to you in an email.
We have customers running very redundant environments via the app server load balancing and master-slave DB configurations we provide at the click of a button. In addition, our design has the safety of not making customer environments reliant on our own application. If there is a problem in our application it only effects the ability to deploy, provision new resources, etc. It doesn’t effect the operation of a customers running environment at all and we feel adds more safety than the multi-tenant environment in Heroku.
Also, we did a pricing analysis against Heroku and we discovered that once you have gone beyond the low priced/free entry level servers with Heroku, you might be paying a lot more.
Check this out:
Let’s take a production app running on two small instances on Engine Yard Cloud and a third instance running a dedicated database. And let’s say you have 10GB of data with daily snapshots = 300GB of data (very, very conservative – assumes that all the data changes every day).
On Engine Yard that configuration will cost (Cloud Plan):
2 x small instances = $259.20
1 x database instance = $129.20
300 GB of EBS space = $30.00
Bandwidth + i/o ~ $20.00
*******************************
Total = $438.40
(Each small cloud instance runs 6 mongrels, so this runs 12 mongrels in a redundant configuration.)
An equivalent environment on Heroku would be:
12 Dynos = $396
Ronin Database = $200
Backups = $20
************************
Total = $616.00
In this case, Engine Yard works out to be about 30% cheaper than Heroku.
If you are interested, I would be happy to discuss this in further detail or show you a quick technical demo of our Engine Yard Cloud product. Please let me know what are good dates and times for you to talk next week.
Thanks for your time, I appreciate it.
Best Regards,
Manpreet
It was considerate of EngineYard’s rep Manpreet to contact me, but to be honest he’s scared me off with those hundreds of dollars quotes like that’s nothing for a small guy startup like me to pay for hosting.
Anyway, I post this here in the hope it is of use to others weighing up the differences between Heroku and EngineYard.
I’ve e-mailed Heroku about the following things, I’ll update the blog if I get a response Heroku have responded see Update 1 below.
- Heroku’s multi-tenant vs EngineYard’s single-tenant architecture
- EngineYard’s claim Heroku doesn’t offer support or monitoring
- Estimates for sites with 10,000 / 50,000 / 100,000 visitors per month
Update 1
Oren Teich of Heroku has kindly taken the time to send this detailed response – many thanks Oren
Hi Eliot,
Thanks for getting in touch. To respond to each of your questions directly:
* Heroku’s multi-tenant vs Other’s single-tenant architecture
In any compute environment, if a server fails that will impact your application. That isn’t different if you’re on Heroku or any other provider. The question is, how do you handle the failure. The very multi-tenancy that Heroku provides gives us a huge advantage in handling this. Every system is fully redundant for EVERY user on Heroku, from the $0/month on up. This means that there is no single point of failure (SPOF).
When you use a service that makes you manage your own VMs/AMI/EC2 images, the SPOF problem is _yours_ to manage and maintain. When you start small with a single image, if that image goes down your app is down. The Heroku stack is made up of 6+ discreet layers to provide users with the performance and flexibility they require. If you wanted to duplicate this setup elsewhere, you would need at least 12 different images.
* The claim Heroku doesn’t offer support or monitoring
This is false. http://support.heroku.com is available, and as you can see from tweets on twitter, people love our support. It is true that we don’t offer 24×7 support right now, though that is coming soon. All apps are fully monitored. Heroku’s entire philosophy is to take the management pain out of the hands of the customer. We don’t make you manage your own images. We don’t make you manage software payloads.
The way we handle monitoring specifically is we have extensive internal monitoring, tracking over 100 metrics. 99% of the time, we are able to resolve any issues without the customer ever experiencing any issues. On the rare situations that an issue is visible to the customer, we post an update to http://status.heroku.com and reach out to effected users, working with them 1:1 to ensure their app is fully restored.
* Estimates for sites with 10,000 / 50,000 / 100,000 visitors per month
This is always tricky, since every app is different. Here’s the short version – 10,000 per month should easily be handled by the free dyno. 50,000 is $36/month. 100,000 is up to $100/month, depending on your app performance. For reference, we have sites serving >200,000,000 (yes million) visitors per month, and they spend in the range of $1500.
From the deployment in <5 minutes to a COMPLETELY managed operational stack, we believe, and our customers tell us all the time, that Heroku saves them hours, days and even weeks. Often, by using Heroku our customers are able to forgo additional hires. As a user of Heroku said (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=883691), “It’s only expensive if your time is worthless”. That said, we often wind up being an incredibly reasonable place to host your application.
The details: Let’s make a few assumptions. If you’re app responds to a request in 200ms, each dyno can serve 5 requests per second. A free dyno could theoretical serve of 432,000 requests per day. Even with peaky traffic and multiple reuqests per visit, that’s still 20,000 visitors per day, for FREE. To get concurrency with 2 or more dynos, you’re now serving twice the traffic. It’s literally 1 second to change your concurrency, and we bill based on the hour so you can do it anytime, and see the impact for yourself.
Ultimately of course, this is just a vendor selling their product. The best thing to do is try it out for yourself – get an app up and runing on Heroku, and let us know how it’s working for you! We think you’ll love it, and we’d love to hear your feedback, good bad or indifferent!
Thanks for giving us the time to answer your questions,
Oren Teich
So who would you opt for?
Both hosts have very happy customers who swear they would never go anywhere else so I’m going to assume their service levels are high and comparable to each other (especially for my meagre needs).
So what separates them in my mind for my small solo startup use case is initial cost and personality.
And so my choice between the two would be Heroku, because 1) how honestly presented their communication was; 2) they didn’t make any false claims against their competition; and 3) you can try out their offering free. See Update 2 below, EngineYard’s CTO agreed the e-mail was in a poor tone and has taken steps to rectify it.
For me this doesn’t end here, there is one thing that is stopping me from switching to Heroku – I want a full SSL cert for Missed Connections and the cost is $100 per month, which I can’t stretch to, so that leaves me back at square one 
. If I come up with a new option I’ll report it here. (Here’s why Heroku’s full SSL fees are at this price)
Update 2
EngineYard Co-Founder and CTO Tom Mornini kindly tweeted about the original EngineYard e-mail. Due to EngineYard’s enthusiastic customers I get the feeling the dodgy tone of that e-mail was uncharacteristic of EngineYard and Tom’s tweet confirms that:
@eliotsykes I apologize for tone of initial email. I’ve personally communicated displeasure with tone to our VP Sales, who agreed. From @tmornini
