http://wojciech.oxos.pl/post/277669886/save-on-herokus-custom-ssl-addons

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.