MAMattRogish·Jun 2, 2012
I think Heroku is a great tradeoff for brand-new startups that are cash-strapped and also have no sysadmin capabilities.
Buying your own hardware - or using a blank VM provided by a VPS company - and setting them up immediately puts you in sysadmin mode from day one. New apache vulnerability? Your problem. Operating system upgrade? That's you, too.
What about security? Do you know all the ways that bad people can get into your system? How do you lock it down? Do you know how to properly configure the firewall?
What about a hardware failure? Now you're running back and forth from Fry's to your datacenter. Or in a VPS - you're going to have downtime while your provider moves your VM to another box. Depending on the scale of the outage, you could be down for a long time. Ugh.
Yes, Heroku is more expensive than your own hardware. So are tons
Read the rest
of other VPS/VM hosting facilities out there.
Personally, I also really like RailsMachine. They built something called Moonshine (https://github.com/railsmachine/moonshine) that uses Puppet and Ubuntu to spin up properly configured, locked-down servers at the drop of a hat. I'd try something like that before managing my own infrastructure as an early-stage startup.
Some things are better outsourced; as a startup your most valuable currency is not a few hundred dollars per month - but your time. Wasting it playing sysadmin isn't worth the cost.