Oct 30, 2009
Heroku vs EngineYard Cloud vs Joyent
vs 
vs 
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 = $616.00In 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
Hi Eliot, full disclosure:
I do work for Engine Yard and my opinion is biased. That said I do believe we are the best deal around for Rails hosting when you look at total cost of ownership.
I can speak to the last point you have: “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”.
Feel free to model out an environment on EY’s cloud here. http://www.engineyard.com/products/cloud/pricing/price-estimator
After Nov. 1st the pricing will get even better as we are passing on the recent AWS price drops: http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2009/announcement-engine-yard-cloud-price-reduction/
You’ll note that there’s only a minimum of $25/month (works to about $122/month if you’re running a single instance full-time, will be lower after Nov. 1st). This is not even the most important point.
Think of the amount of time your DBAs would take to set up a database, a redundant slave, replication, and backups. Same goes for your sysadmins configuring your app tier, load balancing, keeping security patches updated, etc. This is time and money and often not considered when looking at hosting. The true costs of configuring and supporting an environment have to be considered.
You can actually have a production-grade environment up and running within 15 minutes on Engine Yard’s public cloud. With optional support you can also have some of the best Ruby experts and sysadmins support your app 24/7 giving you peace of mind.
I’d be happy to walk through any other questions you may have and even do a demo for you. I’m at: vsharma /at/ engineyard (.) com
Hi Vivek, thanks for the response, Engine Yard takes first place for social media response times.
Engine Yard sounds like a good proposition for bigger companies, but for me, a solo self-funded entrepreneur, it is looking a tad pricey.
I completedly understand the time-saving argument however the admin stuff doesn’t take up so much time, especially post-automation, and I don’t have any DBAs to support. I see this time-saving argument from all of the premium-hosting companies, but it only starts making significant savings once you’ve got scaling problems, that’s one of those good problems to have that I’ve not been fortunate enough to encounter.
So for now, due to the pricing I think self-funded coder-entrepreneurs like me will have to rely on cheaper self-admin or shared hosting until the point our projects get a good income stream at which point we can trade up to EngineYard or similar.
I’ve run Heroku since it’s beta period and have contacted their support several times. I’ve been helped twice by Oren and they’re always fast and super-nice when replying. Even when my complaint was somewhat invalid and stupid =P
I agree with you that the 100 dollar price-tag for SSL is a bit too much. I’m trying to get an app out there with SSL and for the initial stage I just can’t handle that, but it doesn’t get better with EngineYard, even with their cheapest configuration after nov 1st that comes to about right around 100 bucks as well.
Personally I think I’m unfortunately going to have to self-host because of the Heroku SSL price. 20 bucks for a slice at slicehost and I have a private IP and the ability scale and monitor for the first cycle of the application.
We use EY and love it. I’d vote for them, they seem to be more flexible for your random toys that you want to play with (ie. delayed_job, own daemons, etc.)
I’m in the same position. I use a $30/month virtual dedicated server and it comes with an SSL cert. It feels like I have my own machine (even though I’m sharing) and can do almost whatever I want on it. I suppose some of the generic cloud services would be even cheaper when things are early and visitor count is low. But I don’t have experience with them so can’t comment.
Besides being a programmer I’m a reasonably decent sysadmin so it isn’t a problem for me to setup and maintain my own server. If you aren’t as fluent in admin tasks it might take a lot of extra time to figure things out.
I’ve had a great experience working with Rails Machine. You might want to add them into the mix as well.
Eliot, great post, I love that you posted the e-mails, everyone benefits with sunshine. It is amazing how vendors don’t seem to realize how much money $100 is. If someone could come up with high performance, high reliability, incrementally scalable hosting starting at $20, they’d be hugely successful. Amazon has the right atomic pricing philosophy (you pay by the hour) but the minimal monthly cost is too high. I guess I’d like Amazon EC2 variable costing with 1and1′s minimum monthly cost (like 2 or 3 bucks). Anyway, great post, thanks for sharing your correspondence.
Hey there Elliot, I’ve found this blog post very interesting. I think its very honest and points out the issues you face as a self-funded developer quite directly.
I’ll dare to jump into this conversation, even if Webbynode is a much younger and smaller company than EngineYard and Heroku (We’re 100% self funded).
Our main focus since we started the Webbynode project has been to provide a full service geared to developers who are in a situation such as yours. We provide many important tools to application deployment, such as Github integration, our Readystacks for Rails, Django & LAMP and some others. However, we have made sure all these extra features come at the same price of competing services of other virtual hosting providers who don’t provide any of our features.
In all honesty, I’m not making this comment to ‘fight’ EngineYard or Heroku over customers, but to make sure users like yourself – know that we exist and there is such an option out there.
Here’s a recent article where we are mentioned vs Heroku: http://www.rubyinside.com/heroku-gets-add-ons-serious-ruby-webapp-hosting-made-easy-2664.html
and also at: http://www.railsinside.com/news/294-webbynode-rails-vps-hosting.html
and a great video by Gregg Pollack: http://vimeo.com/5384517
Thanks,
Carlos Taborda
Founder & CEO
Webbynode
These prices have to come down. I’d love a service to help get rails apps up and running, but the alternatives arent worth the premium over a simple 40/mo slicehost which with a little tinkering, anyone can get working.
Also, the full stack approach of engineyard and heroku has disadvantages. I’ve deployed apps for clients to both services and while the initial deployment is nice, its not so nice when you want to do anything out of the ordinary. For example, my client wanted a simple SqlBuddy installation so they could see access their database. That was a no go, since there was pretty much no nice way to get PHP onto that system. One slicehost it was as simple as an apt-get install.
How exactly does Joyent compare here though? You’ve only had a shared hosting account with them. Not exactly apples and apples.
[...] Shared Heroku vs EngineYard Cloud vs Joyent. [...]
jc,
Thats exactly what Webbynode is.
Best,
Carlos.
I’m the employee that contacted Eliot and “wasted his time”. He was complaining he couldn’t afford to pay his ~$9/month bill on Joyent. I’m the CEO. Yes, I reached out to a $9/month customer. We care that much. And I wasted Eliot’s time wondering with him whether Joyent could give him free hosting in exchange for a badge on his site. Since his site gets no traffic, we decided to pass.
Hi David,
There’s a lesson here to learn from the over-keen EngineYard sales rep, skip to the end if you want the spoiler.
Anyway, thanks for stopping by. I had thought about not publishing your comment but then if you posted it here you probably want this discussion to be public so be it.
What follows is my opinion. If anyone has the endurance to still be reading this, naturally form your own opinion, there’s always two sides to a story.
In Early October I reached out to Missed Connections’ users via Twitter to ask for help with Joyent hosting fees. My last programming gig had ended and I decided to concentrate full time on my own projects to see if I can make them work. My long term goal is to secure my family’s future. So money is tight and I was looking for help through this rough patch. (BTW David, I don’t remember complaining about the size of the Joyent hosting bill, it is genuinely good value. $99 for a year + $60 SSL is good value for the shared accelerator startup package.)
Anyway, David Young (CEO) contacted me out of the blue after I tweeted my twitter friends for help. Remember David (CEO)? You tweeted asking me to send my e-mail address? I was touched that Joyent had an employee (he’s the CEO) who would do that.
So we had a few e-mails and then you didn’t reply to my last e-mail. I think I had to follow you up for a reply to a previous e-mail before that, let me just check Gmail…oh yes, 12 days with no response to me asking you where I could get a badge so I wrote an e-mail asking if Joyent were still thinking of helping after the initial offer of the badge for hosting swap. Perhaps you had an emergency during this time or were on leave and couldn’t respond, fair enough, if that’s the case then I take back my claim of my time being wasted and apologise, this has just been a minor misunderstanding.
Some fact checking is in order. David, you wrote that Missed Connections gets “no traffic”, I guess that’s a bit like writing you have “no tact”. Both statements are wrong, they are just referring to amounts that are less than what is good for you. Missed Connections is a niche topic, it is not supposed to get LinkedIn size traffic.
Is it odd that it is only now after I mentioned Joyent on a blog post that is getting some coverage in the tech community that David has got back to me? Thanks for reaching out and absolutely not wasting my time.
FWIW I’m still with Joyent, and I’m thinking of sticking with them after one of your staff (Linda) suggested an upgrade to a dedicated accelerator to handle Missed Connections zero visitors. She is genuinely good at what she does, I hope you’re giving her team a good bonus this year.
Oh, and the lesson? Try not to BS your customers. (Bonus lesson for me, a team can still be good even if the captain is sometimes off his game).
Just wanted to say thanks to Tyler for mentioning RailsMachine and Carlos for adding Webbynode to the mix here.
Also, I think Kevin hit the nail on the head with this comment
“If someone could come up with high performance, high reliability, incrementally scalable hosting starting at $20, they’d be hugely successful. Amazon has the right atomic pricing philosophy (you pay by the hour) but the minimal monthly cost is too high. I guess I’d like Amazon EC2 variable costing with 1and1’s minimum monthly cost (like 2 or 3 bucks). ”
I’d like to add that if this imaginary hosting company can do the firewall and security updates for the servers too, that’d be magic.
[...] Heroku vs EngineYard Cloud vs Joyent – blog.eliotsykes.com interesting look at some of the specialized cloud hosting options from a user's perspective (tags: heroku engineyard joyent cloud user feedback) [...]
Not taking sides here, just note that anyone who says “there is no SPOF” is sadly mistaken. There’s always a SPOF, be it the external network, DNS providers, peering companies, the datacentre itself/themselves. You just need to know what the SPOFs are and decide which ones are acceptable. S3 is apparently set up to cope with one earthquake, mirroring stuff on different fault lines. A large asteroid hitting the hosting region or an exchange of strategic weaponry between the US and Russia are events they have decided not to worry about. So: accept SPOFs. Plan for them.
I’m not affiliated with either EY or Heroku.
That being said, I love Heroku. I used to host things myself at home, but that got lame, and while managing servers is kind of fun, it gets boring and repetitive. Go with heroku, git push, done!
I’d like to try EY (we are looking for hosting at the company I work for, but I want to try EY).
I might email them…
Interesting blog post. We’ve used a number of the companies that you mentioned so I thought I’d just drop a few thoughts on each:
Joyent: We started on one of their accelerators a few years back. Really cool technology and great performance, but didn’t like the support model (there wasn’t really any at the time, just custom arrangements). Plus it was a Solaris environment and it seemed to differ just enough to make setting up custom things a bit annoying.
EngineYard: We moved from Joyent to EngineYard and have been pretty happy with the support. It’s definitely 24×7 support, which is great for emergencies, but it still helps to know a thing or two about your setup and things get done much much faster if you get involved (push them along, chat in IRC, do some research on your own, etc). In the beginning it was nice because there wasn’t really a sales team, but lately the sales team seems to pop-up pretty often, which makes things slower and less pleasant. I guess that’s just them growing up.
Slicehost: For some of our simpler sites that get less traffic, using deprec on slicehost has actually been a pretty good setup.
Eliot –
Good writeup of the two.
Point of advice on the startup side, without weighing in in favor of either host: controlling costs is important, but what about getting more revenue? $100/mo is less than 50% of the cost of an Oyster card for zones 1-6. It’s going to be hard to get the core cost of running your business (not hobby) below the cost for an individual to get to work. (Imagine if a restaurant thought it could get its rent to a number below the cost of the petrol an employee used getting there!) In the scheme of running a business, $100/mo is simply not a lot — although it is for a hobby. So first, decide whether you have a business or an expensive hobby.
Put another way, you’re in the diminishing returns area. You can spend hours (I certainly have, at my startup) trying to squeeze a $100 cost down to $50. Or to get a $60/mo cost down to $45. Or to get a $9/mo cost down to $0.
And it is sensible to do these things….IF you’re not a programmer capable of creating additions to your business that will make it grow faster. Is your iPhone app done yet? Have you found a sustainable growth model? Have you figured out how to grow revenue? Can you answer how you will increase the percentage of your users who will give you money in exchange for your service? Then you don’t have time to shrink a $100 cost. Realistically, it will be far easier for you to get the next $1000 in monthly revenue than to keep futzing with the hosting solution. I’m a programmer, so I know the temptation is to do what we know (hosting!) and not what we don’t (monetization!).
But realistically, if you have a business that you couldn’t afford to buy a beer for every month, perhaps it’s time to do something different with the business so that it pays for its hosting and then some. If you start with a blank sheet of paper and consider what avenues might make your business more successful, and then rank the list, you’re not going to end up with hosting costs in the top 10. No matter how cheap your hosting is, if you don’t solve the revenue problem you’ll eventually shut it down.
Disclaimer: I don’t work for any of the companies listed here. I just run a semi-successful startup (over $200k annual revenues, with zero financing), and I have wasted probably more time than you care to consider on dead ends like trying to cut hosting or phone costs. I think you have a good idea, if you focus on it.
No need to post this comment if you don’t want. But the Joyent CEO totally
came at you wrong says my right half. My left half says you started it, and I hate when people call my business out on Twitter, leaving people with the wrong impression.
@RG – Thanks for the comments:
On your 1st comment: Change in hosting was due to dissatisfaction with Joyent, not to save a few bucks.
On your 2nd comment: Read through my earlier comment to see how it played out.
You can save on Custom SSL by hosting multiple apps under one multi-domain or wildcard certificate:
http://wojciech.oxos.pl/post/277669886/save-on-herokus-custom-ssl-addons
[...] Shared Heroku vs EngineYard Cloud vs Joyent – blog.eliotsykes.com. [...]
What RG said.
$100/mo. is nothing when it comes to business expenses. I am in real estate and fork out $3,000/mo in print advertising that does a lot less than my web stuff as far as generating leads. In the end, if profit > cost including labour, then why not do it? My print produces money, so it’s not a pipeline I’m going to ignore, even though it’s not as juicy as tech.
That being said, a free developer option is certainly attractive – in particular when you are just experimenting with ideas.
Mostly, thanks for brining a lot of quality providers to the table for me, a fresh customer for some rails cloud hosting company. Yes Joyent, I am even going to read your propaganda, so it’s not all bad.
Heroku no longer requires $100/month for SSL. Their “Hostname Based Custom SSL” is currently in beta. I think it will end up costing a lot less than $100, but I don’t know how much. They also have piggback SSL for development (free) and SNI SSL which can work for internal/admin stuff or APIs ($5).
Thanks Paul, very useful to know, this is great news, I wonder how much it’ll cost?