Harsh. I'm going to ignore the more inflammatory parts of this (feel free to restate if you want me to engage in discussion), but one bit did grab my attention:
"A major selling point of Heroku is that scaling wouldn't be a risk"
This is interesting, especially the word "risk." Can you expand on this?
Very small customer here. I don't know much about the abstraction you provide us and I don't want to know as long as things go well.
To my point of view, the routing is "random" thus kind of unpredictable. If scaling becomes more of an issue with my business, the last thing I want is to have random scaling issues that I can not do anything about because the load balancer is queuing requests randomly to my dynos.
I want my business to be predictable and if I'm not able to have it I'm going to pack my stuff and move somewhere else.
For now, I'm happy with you except for your damn customer service. They take way too long to answer our questions!
Absolutely right, I totally agree. Random scaling issues that you can't either see or control is exactly the opposite of what we want to be providing.
Can you email me (adam at heroku dot com) some links to your past support tickets? I'd like to investigate.
Thanks for running your app with us. Naturally, I expect you to move elsewhere if we can't provide you the service you need. That's the beauty of contract-free SaaS and writing your app with open standards: we have to do a good job serving you, or you'll leave. I wouldn't want it any other way.
Fire-fighting during the scaling phase is a problem that every fast-growing software-as-a-service business will probably have to face. I think Heroku makes it easier, perhaps way easier; but I hope our marketing materials etc have not implied a scaling panacea. Such a thing doesn't exist and is most likely impossible, in my view.
My company has been building apps for startups for years, and I can confirm that Heroku is consistently perceived as a "I never have to worry about scaling" solution.
Very useful observation. I'd love to figure out how we can better communicate that while we aim to make scaling fast and easy, "you never have to worry about scaling" is much too absolute.
Your marketing materials clearly use phrases like "forget about servers", "easily scale to millions of users", "scale effortlessly" and so forth. You're making it very easy to misunderstand you.
"A major selling point of Heroku is that scaling wouldn't be a risk"
This is interesting, especially the word "risk." Can you expand on this?