Agreed; after using their product for many months, I learned how it is little better than running your own instances. There are some cool things it does, but you end up doing plenty of sysadmin work yourself, writing Chef recipes for anything not supported by their (aging) platform, and then you lose the benefit of support as well. Did I mention that support costs start at $275 (12/5) or $475 (24/7) a month?[1] Without it, you can't open a ticket.
It's also increasingly annoying to see shots taken at Heroku in their blog posts and on Twitter. It's unprofessional. Compete on features and services, please.
"It's also increasingly annoying to see shots taken at Heroku in their blog posts and on Twitter"
Really? We've always been friendly with everyone in the Rails deployment space, and I don't ever remember taking shots at Heroku specifically, though it's certainly possible that we've expressed disagreement on technologies or practices that they and others may use. I'd appreciate it if you'd point out what you've seen, as it's certainly not part of our philosophy or business practice.
With respect to your comment about our "aging" platform, we all age a bit every day. There's tremendous work underway at Engine Yard, some visible, some not. This is no-doubt true of every competitive platform. Many of our customers choose to describe this as maturation! :-)
Yes, all platforms that are static and curated in this way are aging every day, and Heroku has some flaws in this area as well. But as I understand it, the base platform of AppCloud is predominately a Gentoo-based custom portage tree that Ezra built years ago, and it has seen very few updates. This causes problems building gems or bugs in gems that are quite rare since most people do not use software/libraries that are so old.
While there may be amazing things in the works, it also seems to take a long time for features to be rolled out, and often these are in betas initially which do not fall under the support contracts. So if we wanted to move to Ruby 1.9, it's at our own risk (or was, last time I looked).
As for the jabs at Heroku, I have seen quite a few, honestly, but I don't have a pile of links for you. Many of them are subtle or implied, and not necessarily untrue. For instance, sure, Heroku was acquired by Salesforce, but I haven't seen any indication as to why that should influence my hosting decision. Companies are bought and sold all the time. The "ey-migrate" tool was also a great time to get a few subtle jabs in.
I am--was--an EY customer as well for some time, about a year, and had been following it since its inception, particularly through a friend who was a customer while it was still in beta.
1. I haven't seen any significant changes to their product, except for the CLI tool as a replacement for capistrano. The CLI tool is a great improvement, but it's still basically a glorified capistrano tool, and doesn't even get close to comparing to the Heroku command-line tool. Predominately, I feel like the product has been stagnant. Support for Ruby 1.9 and Rubinius (currently in beta) is the most exciting thing I've seen lately. It's surprising rbx has taken so long when it's an EY sponsored project!
Part of the challenge with a product like AppCloud is there is no obvious way to update the stack without disturbing applications, but I'd still have liked a way to potentially update our base software (libraries and such) to something more current.
2. I'm so-so on this. Heroku support is free, but is not 24/7 unless you are a very large customer with a support contract. We paid for support, and EY support was sometimes helpful, sometimes not.
3. I'm not talking about objective comparisons here, these are "shots across the bow" so to speak. I know the pros and cons of both services very well, but what I am talking about are "subtle jabs" about how Heroku is not production-ready/capable, etc.
What I meant by that was that we weren't giving away 500 hours on a micro or small instance. We've not found them very useful for Rails/Ruby web apps. It costs us more to give away 500 hours of mediums, but we think the experience is a lot better.
This isn't a jab at heroku. We had the option to provide micro, small, or medium instances. We host most of our apps on mediums so this is a good, powerful instance. 500 hours on a micro is nothing compared to 500 hours on a medium.
It's also increasingly annoying to see shots taken at Heroku in their blog posts and on Twitter. It's unprofessional. Compete on features and services, please.
[1]: http://www.engineyard.com/products/appcloud/support