Tuesday, December 16, 2008

"She's dead, Jim."

Awhile ago if you had asked me about free, super-easy Rails hosting, I would have blown your mind by mentioning Heroku -- cloud-based Rails hosting. FREE cloud-based Rails hosting.

Lately, though, I'm not so sure.

Check out the Heroku Google Group. There are a lot of complaints there, and no one from Heroku is talking. Seeing "my website has been down for 4 days," and then seeing another say "mine too" without any response from the Heroku team is enough to put you on edge. But, maybe these issues are getting handled, and they back-and-forth just isn't taking place on the group. If so, maybe Heroku should think about having their own ticket system or something in place, because as it stands now, all the unaswered complaints are casting a bad light on the service as a whole.

All that considered, if you're looking for an extremely easy way to deploy a trivial little app, Heroku might be for you. I've got my own VPS, but lord knows using Heroku would be a lot easier... but I'll wait until they come out of beta for that.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Heroku has been growing like crazy, and we've been busy working on some exciting new stuff that you'll start to see more about publicly in the coming weeks.

We have so many applications on the platform now that it is difficult to maintain communications through the Google Group. We are putting new support systems and forums in place that will go live shortly.

Unknown said...

Can't say I blame you for that.

Still, it looks pretty disheartening to take a peek at Heroku's Google Group as it stands right now. I guess it'll clear up once your new support systems go into production, but until then, you'll probably get annoying criticism like mine every once in awhile.

Unknown said...

Definitely not annoying - we appreciate your comments. Over 20,000 apps live on the platform now, it's actually a tiny percentage of users who have unresolved issues.

Nonetheless, we could be doing better on that front, and we are definitely working on it. You'll see that clearing up very shortly.