EC2 vs. Heroku vs. Blue Box Group for Rails Hosting

Not to kick a company when it’s (literally) down, but today’s 12+ hours EC2 outage has finally driven me to write a blog post I’ve been holding in my head for several months now: comparing a few of the major players within today’s Rails hosting ecosystem. In this post, I’ll compare and contrast EC2, Heroku, and Blue Box Group. I’ve chosen these three not only because of their popularity, but also because I believe each has a value proposition distinct from the other two, which which makes each ideally suited for different types of customers. In the interests of full disclosure, we are a current Blue Box Group customer, but we have spent a great deal of time looking at our choices, and I think that all have their advantages in specific situations. The facts and opinions below are the result of weighing data gleaned from Googling, popular opinion, and three years running a Rails site that has grown to serve more than 2m uniques per month.

Heroku vs. EC2 vs. Blue Box Group, Round 1: Price

Let’s start by establishing a pricing context. We’ll use a dedicated (not-shared resource/virtual) 8 GB, 8 core server with 1TB bandwidth as our baseline, since it is available across all three services (with some caveats, mentioned below).

Heroku EC2 (High-CPU XL) BBG
Dedicated 8-Core Server with 8 GB $800.00 $490.00 $799.00*
1 TB Bandwidth $0.00 $125.00 $0.00
Total $800.00 $615.00-695.00** $799.00

* In the case of BBG, their most current prices aren’t on their pricing page. They should fix that.

** This doesn’t include I/O costs for Amazon EBS. While these are fairly impossible to predict (varying greatly from app to app), it sounds from Amazon like you’d be talking about something more than $40 for this. Give that we’re comparing a “high end machine” here, perhaps $80 might be a more accurate estimate, that would make the price more like $700.

Various minor approximations were made to try to get this as close to apples-to-apples as possible, but the biggest caveat is that the Heroku instance (Ika) only has about 25% the CPU as the EC2 and BBG instances (though it has the same amount of memory. They don’t configure their DBs with comparable CPU muscle). The next highest Heroku instance (Zilla) is $1600 per month, and more comparable to the other two in terms of CPU, but has twice as much memory as they do. Note that EC2 and BBG make offer discounts when committing to a year of service — I couldn’t find a comparable offer from Heroku, which is not to say that it doesn’t exist (readers?). These discounts typically range from 10-25% off the no-commitment price.

Heroku vs. EC2 vs. Blue Box Group, Round 2: Setup

Heroku is ridiculously get started with, the runaway winner of the bunch when it comes to hitting the ground running with zero red tape. Per their homepage, all you do is run a couple rake commands and you’re in business. Even cooler, they offer a vast and useful collection of add-ons to make it easy to get started on whatever the specific thing is that you app is supposed to do.

Setting up Rails with EC2 is not quite the same walk in the park, but it’s not necessarily bad. Amazon handles configuring the OS for you, so in terms of getting your app server setup, you are essentially just getting Ruby and Rubygems installed, and letting Bundler take care of the rest. If you managed to set up your development environment in Linux or on a Mac, chances are you won’t have too much trouble using packages to fill in the gaps for other non-Ruby elements to your application (like Sphinx). When EC2 gets trickier is when you start figuring out how to integrate EBS (Amazon Elastic Block storage, necessary for data that you don’t want to disappear) and the other 20 Amazon web services that you may or may not want/need to use to run your app. It can ultimately amount to quite a research project to figure out which tools you want, which ones you need, and how to tie them all together. That said, you may end up using these tools (S3 in particular) even if you use BBG or Heroku, so that cost is not entirely unique to using EC2.

Ease of getting started on Blue Box is somewhere in between EC2 and Heroku. There is no high-tech set of tools that automatically build stuff like Heroku, but unlike EC2, you have a friendly and qualified team willing to help you get your server setup in the best possible way. In my experience, when they have setup new servers, they will ask in advance how we plan to use the server, and then automatically handle getting all of the baseline stuff we’ll need installed such that we can just focus on deploying our app. Which brings me to Round 3…

Heroku vs. EC2 vs. Blue Box Group, Round 3: What’s Best Suited for What?

For pet projects, small sites, or newly started sites, I think that hosting with Heroku is a no-brainer. You can be up and running immediately, you get a huge variety of conveniences with their add-ons, and there is a wealth of Google help behind you if you should happen to encounter an trouble, given the immense user base Heroku has managed to establish. All three of these these services can scale up available hardware within hours/minutes-not-days (yay for clouds!), but Heroku is probably the most straightforward to rapidly grow an application with their “Dynos” approach. However, given their highest cost amongst the choices, and their lower-than-BBG application-specific support, the significance of those advantages will erode as your application grows into the 10’s of thousands of monthly visitors.

I believe that EC2’s greatest selling point is its price, with its scalability and ubiquity (= generally good Googlability) being close seconds. As detailed above, on balance, EC2 tends to run 20-30% cheaper than other choices by leveraging their immense scale. Nifty features like auto-scale have the promise of making instant growth possible if you get flooded after your Oprah appearance. The trade-off for those advantages is that you will get 0 application-specific support, and even getting generic system-wide support can be hit-and-miss, as folks who suffered through today’s EC2 outage learned firsthand. Transparency is not Amazon’s strong suit at this point in their evolution, which can be a real problem if you have real customers who depend on your product and want to know when they can expect to see your website again during an outage. Also, as mentioned in the setup section, figuring out your way around the Amazon product ecosystem can be dauting at first.

I would consider EC2 the best choice for intermediate-sized businesses, particularly if 100% uptime is not imperative to their existence. EC2 is a great option for bootstrapped startups who want to get online as cheaply as possible, and are willing to put in the extra work setting up their servers in exchange for those cost savings. Also, since you will probably be unclear about what kind of resources your app is going to consume as it scales, EC2 is a great proving ground to get a sense for what kind of resources you might need if you decide to venture beyond Amazon for improved reliability and service. I would also take a long look at EC2 for huge businesses that can afford their own IT department, which diminishes the significance of EC2’s lack of application-specific support or monitoring.

While their prices are competitive with EC2, I would assert that the real differentiator with Blue Box is their focus on service. Included by default for business-sized BBG customers is 24/7 pro-active human monitoring of all services, including the ability to bring servers back online if they should happen to crash and you’re not around. Having gone through a fair number of web hosts in our day, we we have come to realize that, once you are signed up at a given host, it can be a huge pain to change. Most hosts use this knowledge to their advantage, and after a very romantic honeymoon period, become inattentive to their customer’s needs after it becomes clear the customer would be hard-pressed to move.

At Blue Box, their customer-focused attitude has not diminished a bit over time. We still regularly find them answering our questions…on the weekend…within minutes of the question being sent. Equally important, Jesse Proudman (BBG CEO) has built a team around him that gives the customer the benefit of the doubt. In more than a year of being hosted at BBG, I can not ever remember them “blaming” us for server changes we’ve made that have caused havoc (not the case at some of our past hosts). Instead, BBG has a solution-focused team that is consistently personable, reasonable, and most importantly, effective when it comes to solving tricky application and server problems.

While BBG offers small VPS instances, as well as cloud servers that can quickly scale, I consider their sweet spot to be businesses that have grown beyond the point of being able to easily maintain their server cluster themselves, but they don’t want to hire an on-staff IT guy. Or maybe they do have an IT guy, but they really need two. Over the past couple years, BBG has been our “IT guy,” working to implement systems for us ranging from a Mediawiki server, to load balancers, to Mysql master-master failover clusters. And compared to having a real IT guy on staff, the price is a huge bargain (not to mention the savings on health insurance, taxes, etc.)

Another nice benefit for those that have been stung by EC2/Heroku uptime hiccups: in 20 months with BBG, our total system downtime has been something between 1-2 hours (excluding downtime caused by our mistakes).

Conclusion

The best host for a particular Rails app depends on a number of factors, including phase of development (pre-launch? newly launched? rapidly growing? already huge?), need for 100% uptime, makeup of team, and cash available. Hopefully this post will be helpful to someone trying to figure out which host makes most sense for their unique situation. Please do post any questions or anecdotes from your hosting experience for future Google visitors.

Update: Response from BBG

Blue Box emailed me after this post, with a few extra details that I believe are pertinent:

  • 4 x 300GB 15k SAS outperforms EBS (which both Heroku and Amazon rely on) by almost 30% based on our client benchmarks.
  • Neither Heroku nor Amazon provide 24 x 7 monitoring with proactive human response. This can be is a *key* differentiator, particularly when comparing costs.
  • All of our dedicated database instances are running bare metal, meaning you gain consistent and reliable performance, and aren’t subject to similar massive outages caused by the muli-tenancy of a SAN.

If anyone from Amazon or Heroku would like to provide extra details of what makes them a strong choice, I’d be only too happy to post those as well.

9 Replies to “EC2 vs. Heroku vs. Blue Box Group for Rails Hosting”

  1. Pingback: HostPound.com
  2. Note that Engine Yard offers an optimized Rails stack on the EC2 High-CPU XL for $562 for a month with a pass-through of the EC2$125 bandwidth charge for a total of $687 for the configuration above, with great service, easy startup, excellent Rails expertise, and high resilience in events like the recent EC2 outage.

  3. Hey Mike,

    Thanks for the note! I quite nearly included Engine Yard in this comparison, since I believe they are certainly in the upper echelons of Rails hosting choices. That said, I have personally known two different friends who have switched away from EY over the last year, each quoting lapses in support and unpredictable system performance (entirely possible that they might have been on shared hosts). Being that this is circumstantial/anecdotal information, I don’t want to spread FUD that Engine Yard can’t be a great host, but this was ultimately what led me to choose these three providers for my comparison (particularly in the absence of any friends that have mentioned positive experience at EY). Perhaps this post will drive some of the more satisfied EY customers to share their anecodtes.

  4. For those who want a cheap nice/dedicated server hosting provider Softlayer has been for me the best in the business, they don’t know much about Rails specifics, but if you have a problem with your server (even if is your fault) they will help you as fast as they can (5 – 15 minutes respond).
    I have been working with them since Ev1 (like 5+ years) and I’m still happy and with 10+ servers.
    Hope it help.

  5. Thanks, Miguel. I found another good link comparing Rackspace and EC2 (obviously biased toward Rackspace since they published it, but interesting nonetheless):

    http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/servers/compare/

    Bonus points that I think they have the best designed and most informative website this side of Heroku.

    I couldn’t find a word about Rails-specific support in the Rackspace literature though, which is an explicit focus of BBG. That said, Rackspace certainly puts their best foot forward through their site. I wonder what their usage is compared to EC2?

    Here’s another fairly informative blog post that prefers Rackspace to EC2:

    http://gasoftwareblog.com/home/2011/3/31/amazon-ec2-vs-rackspace-are-all-cloud-hosting-services-the-s.html

    That said, I’d still be hard-pressed to recommend them over BBG without hearing from a customer that had experienced Rackspace taking care of niceties like load balancers, Nagios alerts, and redundant memcache servers, which are essential for running a site at scale. All of these are available from BBG to be automatically configured and maintained for sites being hosted there. Quite possible that Rackspace might also provide these, but having not been their customer I’m not sure?

  6. Hi Bill,

    Just came across this comparison of yours between Amazon EC2 vs Heroku vs Blue Box Group. This is a great article and one of the most detailed reviews I €™ve seen of Heroku. Wanted to know if you’d like to feature this post on getcomparisons.com? A project we €™ve started to house all the best product comparisons on the web under one roof. You can back-link to this original article of course. Check it out, and if you’re interested, I will send you an invite.

    Cheers,
    Akshay Arabolu, Founder

  7. I think that some of your comments regarding the availability of EC2 is misleading. Amazon let you architect your infrastructure to specific application needs. If you require no downtime then multiple availability zones should be used. It amazes me how large companies blame AWS for an outage e.g. Netflix. They should architect their infrastructure to work around outages.

  8. Great post! Bluebox has move out of the managed hosting space and they only sell Openstack to Enterprises. We at NIRDHOST are in the managed hosting space left open by Bluebox. It would be great for you to check out our offering and give us your thoughts.

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