HN user
Good points. Keep in mind the OP is talking about a 14x multiple of annual run rate, rather than trailing 12. He's calculating annual run rate as 12x his most recent month. Considering it's a quickly growing company, if he were calculating his multiple as a multiple of trailing 12, it would be higher than 14.
Rob, best of luck to you and the Twilio team while fixing and recovering from this incident.
We've been with Twilio for years and have received excellent service. Billing issues are always serious, but its nothing compared to a call routing issue, and when it comes to call routing Twilio has been flawless. I'd much rather call my bank and discuss an overdraft fee then call a client and explain why their calls were not routed properly.
In the years we've been with Twilio, we have not experienced any significant downtime. Compare that to one of their main competitors that experienced eight consecutive hours of downtime during business hours earlier this year, and I'm confident we're in good hands.
I see your point about growth, but I disagree over the term bootstrap. I interpret bootstrap to be about external investment. Its possible to have a high-growth company (a "startup"), that receives no investment, or receives investment by the founders.
Mailchimp is a fantastic example. Bootstrapped with 9 figure revenues and crazy profits. http://www.quora.com/MailChimp/How-much-revenue-is-MailChimp...
I second the vote for Blue Box. We moved from Heroku 8 months ago and have been extremely happy.
I agree with grrrando, there were a few instances of slow responses during setup, but I also agree thats because you're talking to an individual in that case, rather than a support team.
Two of my favorite things about Blue Box: 1) On the first sales call they had a knowledgeable engineer that discussed the specifics of our app. 2) With their online chat I get answers from an engineer within minutes, even on nights or weekends (they have phone support too, I prefer chat)
The Humanscale switch mouse works well for a hybrid vertical / standard mouse.
http://www.humanscale.com/products/product_detail.cfm?group=...
I use one daily and really like it, although its made of cheap plastic. The $99 list price is pushing it, you can probably find one on ebay for ~$30. I got mine for free at the Humanscale showroom when I went to look at their chairs.
Here's a discussion about that point in the original article's comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5216553
The conclusion is that it will buy you a bit more time, but does not fix the underlying issue.
In Rap Genius' case, they're large enough that they would still have significant issues even if they switched to cedar and unicorn with 2-4 worker processes.
Wonder how all of these people are feeling right now..
We're with bluebox.net and have been very happy.
It is quite an accusation, but I'm far from a bystander in this issue. I have extensive, documented communication with Heroku engineers over the course of 1.5 years (Feb 2011 - June 2012).
I'm not discussing any sort of cooked up statistical models. I'm discussing the real-world experience I had scaling an application on Heroku.
"mud-slinging from one side upon the other"
You imply that I was uninvolved before Rap Genius's expose. I assure you that is not the case. I've chosen a side in this argument well before Rap Genius went public.
"Forgetting who is right and wrong"
The right vs wrong issue here is not the proper way to architect a router. The issue is that Heroku glossed over an extremely important aspect of their engineering documentation, because it painted their platform in a bad light. This is particularly damning, because as an engineer working on their platform, I could design around their shortcomings as long as they don't hide them from me.
Furthermore, I believe we could make an argument Heroku intentionally misled (both in documentation and in their support responses) clients as to how their router worked.
I had a string of similar requests with Heroku between Feb 2011 and June 2012, before we migrated off their platform.
I would complain about h12 errors, they would tell me to upgrade my resources and/or that it was my problem and there was nothing they can do. We ended up with a solution that was easily 10x as expensive (over-powered DB, too many dynos) as our initial configuration, and it still didn't fix the issue.
I'm happy to provide the full text support requests, but they don't tend to be quite as juicy as the one you posted.
We moved our Twilio app off Heroku for the same reasons. Extensive optimizations and we would still get timeouts on Twilio callbacks.
The routing dynamics should be explained better in Heroku's documentation. From an engineering perspective, they're a very important piece of information to understand.
We're with https://bluebox.net now and are very happy.