Your time is valuable. And if you have other **** to build its silly to spend a lot of time trying to save tens of dollars.

Heroku "just works" for lots of things. Are there other things out there that are better? Probably, but for us (and many other people that do similar things) its cheap enough that its not worth spending time trying to save not very much money.

Edit: And remember we were comparing heroku to paying someone to be your sysadmin. Finding, hiring, and paying a sysadmin isn't a trivial or cheap thing to do.

I think you vastly under estimate at how much heroku really costs.

Tens of dollars is the least amount. If you throw in any type of database "stuff" then it gets insanely expensive to the point where you have to think it's a joke but it's not.

Here's my essential list:

"Crane" postgres:
+$50/month minimum because of the ******ed 20 connection limit for "Basic".

"Small" or "Medium" redis:
+$39/month or $169/month because again of unfair and ridiculous limitations.

"Terrier" elastic search:
+$50/month but could easily be more due to ram limitations and the next jump is $280/month

SSL:
+$20/month

I'm going to ignore mailing because there's third party sites where the free tier is going to be good for most cases (<= 10,000 e-mails a month).

New Relic monitoring:
$43/month PER DYNO

I'm not sure which to pick for logging because I never used any of them but you will need some form of logging. The "Squirrel" loggly service is +$49/month.

"Boss" or "Pro" CDN sumo:
+$25/month or $100/month depending on your traffic. Choosing this to get the "no pain" solution from Heroku of course.

Less expensive options: $276/month
More expensive options: $711/month

At this point we're not even including dynos and workers. Throw in a few and it'll certainly be $400+ a month.

I'm very confident I could get the same stuff hosted for $20/month and get better specs for each component, new relic would be another $25/month and ES/CDN would vary but it would be no where near the Heroku prices.

I have a guy who wants me to build him a basic site to host his fantasy football league. It will have around 100 users who will make a few bets each week that get recorded. Will this exceed herokus free tier? Is there any platform that would host a site this size for free?

I just attended similar event in Tallinn, but the focus was on mobile apps. Loved it! A lot of enthusiasm, cool people and great mentors. I was sooo excited after the event and I still am. We also managed to win a special prize for best windows (lol) phone app. Unfortunately... they were windows phones. I worked on android btw.

Most of this stuff is in no way required for something you're throwing up to see how it works. Not is it all required for every type of app.

But even if you were right about required costs - thinking that finding, hiring, paying a sysadmin is cheaper than $400/month seems crazy to me.

jj,

but compared to doing it yourself, 400/mo is a ton of money. especially given that you essentially pay a big up front cost in time, and can then reap the reward of that going forward, especially if you learn how to automate stuff.

Last piece of the puzzle is getting the .jar file to show a webpage. It works on the local machine but apparently there are permission issues or something. I had error 403 so I switched on 755 and ended up creating an FTP page.

One solution is to create an nginx user but that seems wrong.

So close so close.

The costs were straight from heroku's pricing page. Everything there is necessary for a database backed app IMO.

The $400/month for a sys admin is never going to happen but problems don't happen all the time. I mean, my friend has a box at a colo. His site has been getting 30k-180k uniques a month for a few years and he does literally nothing to the box.

The tools I mentioned above are super battle hardened, as long as you configure them properly they are extremely reliable unless you're pushing the boundaries of what that tech can handle in which case money is probably irrelevant to you.

With good defensive programming measures and monitoring you can detect and fix most common problems. If something really goes crazy then you hire someone to fix it if you can't find the solution on google.

A VPS will still handle any hardware issues. I don't mind spending a week researching a bunch of stuff once to be able to fully automate and deploy an instance with the necessary app-related dependencies I need. It only gets easier as you do it more often too.

That's fine. If you're building your own stuff, great. But from a business point of view, the cost of one man week is easily more than a year of heroku - even with the bells and whistles you want. Pretending like learning and doing that doesn't cost money is crazy. Not everybody or every company has the time/resources/people to give somebody a week to learn ****.

My post was directly responding to someone that talked about it being cheaper to pay a sysadmin instead of using heroku. This argument is dumb because it seems to go:

"Heroku is a massive ripoff that should never be used!"

"There are lots of times it makes sense and is well worth it"

"No, look at my one particular use case with my one particular skill set"

I was responding to someone that talked about paying a sysadmin to do it for you.

Basically if someone can't see how heroku is just one more useful tool (with lots of trade offs that have to be considered) that can be used in building and running a business I'll try my best to never be involved in that person's business.

right, i understand.

i mean i think here is a difference though between "there could be a situation where using heroku makes sense" and criticizing the service's pricing, which imo is legitmate. sure, sometimes it makes sense in life to overpay for things because of your time's value, a timeline, etc.

but heroku's company philosophy seems to be, "lol look at all these dev's quaking in fear of sysadmin. how much do you think we can get away with charging them?" it's hard to argue that the philsophy hasn't worked out well for them, and i imagine their profits show it. but as a customer it makes me hate them, because i know they could still be very profitable while charging me much less.

This, to me, is such a strange way of looking at it. But I guess that's the difference, since it doesn't really matter to me if I'm 'overcharged' in some how much profit they make way. If its not worth it, I don't use it, everything is good.

Heroku has definitely made things better for us and definitely offers a valuable service (anything that lets you easily trade off money for developer time is valuable). To think that's its all based on exploiting a fear of sysadmin work just seems wrong.

it's more like, "how the **** is this possible?" i literally don't understand how the service exists at its current prices. i mean, ok, ppl are willing to pay, i get that part. i just don't get how heroku isn't getting undersold by a competitor offering similar services. i just compare it to the VPS market, which is so fiercely competitive that you get great deals like what digitalocean offers.

many people clearly agree with you. but i still think they are evil bastards

I'm looking at it from the POV of:

1. I (me personally) want to host projects ranging from nearly static sites to saas apps for myself or anyone else who wants to use them in some cases.
2. I want to setup hosting for clients.

How do you explain to a client that it's going to cost them $375/month for their 8 page web site that happens to have a little backend? What if they come back with "but I saw a commercial on TV last night and Godaddy says it costs $5/month to have a web site?".

A random client who is going to drop $2,500 on a site and not pay for any marketing is not going to have unpredictable traffic where you can scale up in seconds by moving sliders around. You could easily put them on a $5-10/month VPS and they will be good to go.

Can't you just buy one for $400 p/m and charge clients $50 p/m to host it for them in a shared environment? If it's an 8 page website you could probably get 100's of them on one box

I don't use heroku so I don't know how they handle sharing. Can you assign multiple domains to the same dynos/add-ons? How would you handle multiple databases while using the same db add-on? I don't think that would be possible.

No idea, never used it. If $400p/m is the minimum there must be ways to sublet it (but again my experience with it is 0!)

I hope this is the right place for this. Also I don't know anything so laymen terms would be highly appreciated.

If I was interested in building dynamic high frequency trading software and I wanted to take advantage of a lot of open source material. Is there a certain programming language that is better for something like this?

I am looking at this as a long term hobby and was hoping to get pointed in the right direction. Thanks

As far as I am able to tell, you cannot host multiple sites on one dyno, and it doesn't make much sense to me to have that feature with their software.

Someone asked about the bet tracking software upthread. I think you should be fine on the free tier.

I am connected to some of the people that started this company: https://www.quantopian.com/ and they use Python. Its not exactly the answer to your question but thought it might help.

Thank you dude, that is actually better than the right answer. Im actually excited. I can work on strategies while I learn. This is great. Im going to be on there all day. Just a matter of time until Im printing money.

A few posts on quantopian say they are not geared for high frequency trading. Right now they are limited to 1 minute intervals.

HFT requires sub-millisecond response times if you're going balls deep with it and plan to execute thousands of transactions in less than a second. I don't think you can really do this over the web. You would need a direct connection to the exchange I think.

So in theory I could build everything, but not actually trade with it unless I got that connection?

Im fine with that for now and just getting my feet wet with Quantopian. The goal is to build everything though. I read this article in Vanity Fair about a Goldman Sachs programmer that really sparked my interest.

Yeah you could build it for now if you wanted.

It depends on what your definition of high frequency trading is. quantopian only gives you data every 1 minute which isn't very often.

HFT is about performing massive amounts of trades in extremely short time frames and capitalizing on small amounts of profit per transaction. The top places say they can do trades in about 100 MICROseconds. If their data is coming in every 50 microseconds...

There's 1 million microseconds per minute. In 50 microsecond intervals you would have 20,000 data updates vs 1 data update with quantopian. You would be at a huge disadvantage with quantopian in this case. Someone with a direct link and great software could have made 10,000 accurate trades to your 1.

Is that direct link something I can actually obtain in the future and how much does that cost?

I want to build a HFT model. I can learn quantitative trading and programming from quantopian in the meantime. I come from a value investing background so I need it. HFT is about predicting the future a little bit in advance. I think I have an edge in that kind of thinking. I do want to go balls out because I am looking at this as a 20 year project. Thanks Shoe, I appreciate your time.