February 19, 2010 by
I talk about this all the time, but it bears repeating: servers are expensive. They might seem so cheap up front, but once you factor in average maintenance time the actual cost could easily be a thousand dollars a month, if not more, a fact I lamented in a breakdown of the different types of hosting here a few months ago.
Unfortunately, my breakdown didn’t really have any hard numbers because I don’t keep track of task types when I freelance, and I don’t keep track of time at all on my personal projects. But at Firebelly we do, and now that I’ve been here long enough to get a good sample, I decided to run the numbers.
In the past 5 months I’ve spent 42 hours on server maintenance. That is, frankly, insane. That’s thousands and thousands of dollars worth of time. And that doesn’t even factor in back-end development work that had to be done as a result of having physical servers, like having to convert our asset uploads to use Amazon S3 because the server ran out of space (something I’ll get into in a later post). So 42 hours could easily be a conservative estimate. I wouldn’t be too surprised to see the true cost of our servers over 5 months exceed $10,000. Which is an obscene amount of money and the reason I’m so interested in cloud hosting.
In the breakdown I mentioned that Heroku might be the holy grail for Ruby hosting, but I didn’t have any direct experience with it, so it was really all just theoretical. But that was three months ago. Since then I’ve migrated all my personal projects to use Heroku.
Transitioning between hosts is a normally excruciatingly painful process, but moving to Heroku was actually fun. The whole process only took about a half hour for each project and went off virtually without a hitch. The only hiccup was a few differences in syntax between MySQL and PostgreSQL (the database Heroku uses), but that took less than a few minutes to fix, and after that it was all smooth sailing.
Now that I’ve experienced Heroku first-hand, the next step is to move Firebelly projects over, starting with our main site. I’ll recap in a few months after it’s done to report on how it went and how much time it’s saved us.
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