Hosting PotionStore on Heroku?

[Tony Arnold]

Happy Friday Guys :)

Has anyone used Heroku (http://heroku.com/) to host their PotionStore instance(s) yet? I have decided it's time to get off DreamHost for my more critical business sites, and my web store is right at the top of that list.

Any hints, tips or gotchas would be appreciated.

thanks,

Tony

----------

Tony Arnold

http://thecocoabots.com/

[Tony Arnold]

To answer my own question:

I took the plunge last night and migrated my potion store instance from a Dreamhost shared hosting package to a 'Koi' Heroku app. It was incredibly painless - the provided tools took care of converting my MySQL database to PostgreSQL (with zero errors! yay!), and the only gotcha I found was commenting out the following line in config/environments/production.rb:

config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :sendmail

Once I had added the free "Sendgrid" add-on to my application, everything ran perfectly! It's also helped me find some serious problems with the canvas-based charting in my fork on Github, so I'll have some more to contribute there this week too.

I'll let you guys know how it performs under load later in the week.

thanks,

Tony

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[Michael Zornek]

On 3/12/10 7:21 PM, "Tony Arnold" <to...@thecocoabots.com> wrote:

> To answer my own question:
>
> I took the plunge last night and migrated my potion store instance from a
> Dreamhost shared hosting package to a 'Koi' Heroku app. It was incredibly
> painless - the provided tools took care of converting my MySQL database to
> PostgreSQL (with zero errors! yay!), and the only gotcha I found was
> commenting out the following line in config/environments/production.rb:
>
> config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :sendmail
>
> Once I had added the free "Sendgrid" add-on to my application, everything ran
> perfectly! It's also helped me find some serious problems with the
> canvas-based charting in my fork on Github, so I'll have some more to
> contribute there this week too.
>
> I'll let you guys know how it performs under load later in the week.
>
> thanks,
> Tony

Glad to hear all is well. I've never heard of Heroku before.

I'm about a month into my potion store deployment on Slicehost. Overall it's
going well but I've had a few issues pop up.

Twice the server stopped responding. They said it has nothing to do with me
or the other people on the rack. Seemed to be a hardware thing. This second
time they actually ended up moving us to a fresh box (totally transparent
move to me but should fix the issue for the future). The nice part was how
fast notifications were sent out about the outage and progress as they fixed
the issue.

The other issue I ran into with Slicehost was the IP near me was spamming
and one of the bigger spam houses decided to block the whole range instead
of just him. So for a few days I had a lot of bouncing emails. Slicehost
admins did all the dirty work for me to get the issue resolved.

Overall I've found Slicehost to be pretty good. Their articles that walk you
through common setup needs was a huge help to me. I'm not a huge systems
admin geek and while I enjoy Rails development, deployment has always been
something I dread. Thankfully between the Slicehost tutorials and mod_rails
(which wasn't around when I first started using Rails) deployment has gotten
a lot easier.

PS: I know a lot of this has nothing to do with potion store code directly
but I post thinking there are list members who would value the info as part
of the full picture of running a store rather than using a third-party
service/reseller.

~ Mike
--
Michael Zornek
Clickable Bliss
http://clickablebliss.com/