Slicehost, AWS, and Heroku: Looking back at two years of deploying independent Rails apps

I started writing independent Rails apps on my own two years ago this month. One of the key decisions I needed to make early on was where to deploy my apps. After two years using three of the biggest players (Slicehost - now part of Rackspace Cloud Hosting, Amazon Web Services, and Heroku) I give you my take on the experience and toolsets available.

Slicehost - my first Rails deployment environment

Slicehost has a bit of a cult following. I came onto their service after they'd already been acquired by Rackspace, but despite that I felt very connected to the developers and sysadmins that ran it. You could literally jump into an IRC chat with the sysadmins on duty if there was a problem, and get help from the experts immediately.

I ran an application on a VPS from them for 18 months, had only a single service issue (which was handled quickly and professionally), and I basically didn't have to do anything to fix it other than wait for the sysadmins to do their thing. I also spun up several differently sized slices during that time (some for just a day or two for testing), and also seamlessly migrated slices between various sizes. The last time I had a VPS with Slicehost was June 2011, but the experience was great, and I'd recommend them to anyone who wants to run their own server in the cloud without a lot of frills. It's just the developer, and their server: a simple partnership.

Heroku - the slickest app environment around

Heroku. It is by far the easiest way to deploy a Rails app without thinking about infrastructure. Their suite of plugins (and how ridiculously easy it is to add/remove them on the fly) has no match. They also after completely free hosting for small apps with simple needs: a basic database, and a single dyno (web server instance).

It took me a while to try Heroku, but when I did, I found their support documentation to be up to date, detailed, and straight forward. I had no trouble at all getting my first app running on Heroku in less than an hour.I currently run a small app (rpglogger.com) on Heroku, and basically haven't had any issues. That being said, one thing that new developers run into with Heroku is the occasional gem incompatibility or obscure application error. I haven't had too much trouble along these lines, but I have, once or twice, had to do a quick Google search on an application error that only happened after deploying to Heroku, only to find that the solution was very simple: change a config setting, or update a gem. There's a big community of developers on StackOverflow that deploy to Heroku, and pretty much any problem you might have on their platform is documented by someone else who already ran into said problem.

Amazon Web Services - ultimate control

I do quite a few small apps in my spare time, and I find that AWS reserved instances are perfect for this. Since I already had experience running my own server on Slicehost, it was a pretty easy decision to pay only $60 to get a reserved server instance for an entire year (I was paying $25/mo on Slicehost at the time for the smallest slice). Just one micro server on AWS is enough to run 2-4 small apps on the same machine, with multiple web server instances (vs. Heroku's one free dyno), and still have a little memory left over. It's also hard to beat the availability and global deployment footprint of AWS. Since you can get any size server, AWS works equally well for any number of systems, including the independent app on a single server.

On top of the initial cost for the reserved instance, I only have to pay for bandwidth and other AWS usage (S3 storage, for example). This makes AWS an amazing mix of ultimate scalability, great costs, and ultimate control.

Rackspace Cloud Hosting provides similar services, and they're probably comparable for most things. But if what you want is the Swiss army knife of cloud services (servers, load balancing, storage, database, VPN, and even NoSQL options), I think AWS is still way ahead of everyone else.

Conclusions - right tool, right job (no surprise)

So, I started on Slicehost, then tried AWS, then Heroku, and today I'm back on AWS for most of my work. I can't really say too many bad things about any of these services. I think they serve different priorities very well, and that all of these services deliver on what they say they can do:

  • Slicehost for really simple VPS
  • Heroku for the slickest app deployment in town
  • AWS for all the power and flexibility you could want