Heroku and AWS users... You don't have a business.

In fact, Heroku and AWS have a boatload of micro-businesses, one of which you run.

If you're serious about your business, you'll host your own servers at a colo (TWO colos if you're really serious) on different network segments/providers, and use Heroku/AWS as a scaling mechanism and NOT a primary computing platform.

They don't care if you lose customers, as long as you don't cancel YOUR account. They'll get more new customers tomorrow due to the bad press, simply because those customers were out of the loop and just now heard about Heroku or AWS and it looks cool when they get there.

Running your own servers is the responsible thing to do if you want to OWN your business and not just look cool by using the latest brand named cloud service thrown around by everyone.

No, Heroku/AWS zealots will not agree with me, but they've never run their own data center. They have no experience.

Get real people. The cloud is just a REALLY expensive way to sell shared servers.

Why do I say this?

I run my own servers on 3 dedicated 1gbps connections, and while you pay $0.12/GB on AWS/Heroku (actually, Heroku costs more, but they bury it in their worker pricing so it looks free), I pay $0.01 per GB. That's right, 1 cent per GB.

While an 8-core machine costs me $0.42/hour all tolled (machine, power, space), you pay almost $0.66/hour on EC2 with no SLA, meaning you're not ALWAYS getting the same machine specs every minute of every hour. You're getting a MAXIMUM commitment of resources, not a MINIMUM commitment.

Yes, I own my own machines. No, they ARE NOT expensive if you know how to buy them.

Heroku has been down 3+ hours this time, and last year had a 70+ hour outage. On my own servers, I haven't had 3 TOTAL hours of downtime in 5 years.

If you want help with server deployment strategy, contact me directly.