Experience with Heroku and AppHarbor

In the past 2 months I've had the opportunity to use two popular web hosting platforms: Heroku and AppHarbor. I used Heroku to host the blog I wrote using Ruby, Sinatra, and Padrino. AppHarbor was used to host a ASP.Net MVC3 application with SQL Server. I'm writing my experience here.

Heroku

The experience in deploying to both Heroku and Appharbor was great overall. Without Heroku I could have potentially faced hours of reading through help docs and googling error messages, and it's likely I would've given up. Heroku gave me the ability to get my app deployed, and for a novice *nix user that was a huge value. However, it didn't take me long to remember a familiar quote "Automatic just means you can't fix it when it breaks". So far it hasn't broke, so it hasn't been a problem.

Database development and management is a little awkward. I used Sqlite for development, and used the tools in ActiveRecord to connect to a Postgresql instance on Heroku's servers. In my trivial blog application this worked without incident. However, I have never used Postgresql and don't have any motivation to. If I would have needed to leverage some more advanced RDBMS capabilities, I would have preferred to use something I'm more familiar with: SQL Server or MySql.

As a Mercurial user, the deployment experience was a little more arduous than if I had been using Git. The workaround is to use an extension called Hg-Git which acts as a bridge. Hg-Git took longer to configure and setup than I was willing to spend on it(2 minutes?) so I abandoned it. Instead I just created a git repository in my application and committed to it only when I needed to deploy. My .gitignore filtered all the Hg related files, and my .hgignore filtered Git related files. Messy.

The interface for deploying to Heroku is done through a ruby gem. Setting up an account and new application has very few interaction points. I would have preferred to interact with a GUI than reading through help docs to find the right command.

This blog is hosted for free on Heroku.

AppHarbor

Most of my career has been spent building and deploying Microsoft ASP.Net based solutions to IIS. I've fought those dragons enough times that I know what to expect and how to get around the common error messages. Even so, I found AppHarbor to be a breeze compared to a manual deployment.

I use Mercurial almost exclusively for source control along with Bitbucket for free private repository hosting. I was extremely impressed with the integration between Bitbucket and AppHarbor. All it takes is "hg push" for my app to be copied to my shared Bitbucket repository which triggers a copy to AppHarbor which triggers a build and deploy. If you're a Git user, it is also natively supported.

AppHarbor supports MySql and SQL Server. This made database development simple since I can use SQL Server Management Studio to connect and manage my database hosted at AppHarbor. This also means I can use all the tools I know and love for copying schema and/or data.

Setting up a new app is all very simple and straightforward and done through the website.

My small app is hosted for free on AppHarbor.

Summary

I think it's awesome that we have so many great options for development, deployment, and hosting. I've never wanted to spend time figuring out deployment, hosting, or source control issues. These tools get me very close to not having to think about them at all.

Heroku caused a lot of fuss when it was made available for the ruby web world, but AppHarbor is a solid answer that stands up to and even exceeds Heroku's usability. I'm sure each will continue to grow and get even better.