Managed hosting

Hi there,
I am curious what others a doing for large scale managed hosting. Currently we managing our own AWS and I would like to hand those duties over to a 3rd party. I am looking at Heroku but the database we need is $1200/month and the dyno thing seems hard to compare with AWS instance sizes, I'm open to any provider suggestions (Rackspace, Elastic bean stalk, etc).

I would appreciate advice from anyone running a large scale apps with a managed provider. Have you found it worth the cost?

Thanks.

I'd be really curious to hear how ElasticBeanstalk compares. I've used Rackspace in the past for several projects and wasn't impressed.

Heroku is one of those odd things in that the addon prices like database get obscenely expensive quickly. My guess is that ElasticBeanstalk is always going to be cheaper and more flexible than Heroku given that Heroku is built upon AWS. That said you're probably going to have a less easy time horizontally scaling since that's Heroku's bread and butter.

This guy basically said the same thing: https://www.quora.com/How-would-you-compare-Heroku-and-Amazon-Beanstalk-as-far-as-pricing-performance-and-ease-of-use-are-concerned-for-deployment-of-NodeJS-apps

EngineYard would be another option if you're looking for something fairly hands-off. Found another comparison that included them: http://mark-kirby.co.uk/2013/hosting-in-the-cloud-elastic-beanstalk-vs-heroku-vs-engineyard/

I don't know many people using EngineYard, but they have been really popular in the past. If you're already on AWS, you probably will already have all the experience and manpower you need to manage Elastic Beanstalk pretty easily. I think the platforms like Heroku tend to be great until you are paying costs similar to what you would for a full-time devops person. At that point, you might as well start managing your own scaling or start considering it.

Good to know about rackspace. I'd be curious about the details if you are willing to share. Engine yard for whatever reason does not seem that appealing to me.

Another option I am considering is leaving our elastic balancer app servers and job server and just moving our Postgres over to a multi-az RDS instance.

We had both Rackspace cloud and dedicated servers. The dedicated servers cost us like $10k/mo or more. The cloud servers we used were fine, but performance seemed slow for the price. Their managed machines are also fairly expensive.

That's an interesting option as well. I'm curious to hear about what you go with and how it turns out. Hope some other people can weigh in as well.

I have been checking out cloud66.com as an option. Looks very interesting... anyone here ever used it?