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We run a whitelabeled site builder -- think squarespace or shopify (different market, though). We currently host on Heroku, but need to be able to offer customers an IP address so they can easily point their naked domains at our service. Although I want to move to AWS at some point, we're a bit short on resources right now, so I need an interim solution for this.

It seems like I should be able to set up a simple proxy server behind a static IP on Route53 or something that would proxy traffic to our Heroku app. But I've little experience with this sort of thing and don't know A) if this is actually the right way to go about it, B) resources to look at or the right tools to check out, or C) if there are commercial services that would be easier temporarily than running it ourselves.

Thanks in advance for any pointers!

PS - Believe me, I know this is sub-optimal, but there are a number of reasons we definitely have to offer an IP.

jack_was_taken
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  • About your "PS", are those reasons technical in nature? Or are they marketing/business reasons? If they are technical, would you please expand on the reasons? There might be an easier/faster/cheaper/more reliable solution to your real problems, if your reasons are technical in nature. – Bruno Reis Dec 29 '14 at 18:09
  • Nope, unfortunately they're business. This whole thing is actually because we're moving off of a legacy platform where the first engineer didn't think it was a problem to let 2/3 of our paying customers point their apex records at a rackspace IP address. We really don't want to lose a bunch of them during the migration because they're scared by complex solutions. Sigh. That said, it does seem like a reasonable thing to want to offer long term -- it'd be fairly easy if we were on AWS rather than heroku. – jack_was_taken Dec 30 '14 at 19:01
  • By the way any advice you've got, even if it's "yeah, you're right, no shortcuts" would be really helpful. Thanks! – jack_was_taken Dec 30 '14 at 19:07

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You could certainly do this, since a proxy or hand-made LB within EC2 can shuttle traffic off to wherever you need. So HAproxy running on an EC2 instance could pass traffic over to Heroku for you.

However, I see this was posted about 6 months ago and I know Heroku has just reconfigured pricing. So maybe that is encouragement to move into AWS now. My only real worry about your above solution is latency. What if you ran an EC2 instance with Varnish to cache your Heroku app(s) and try to mitigate any sluggishness?

Neal Magee
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