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I'll be building a rails app that will basically serve user-uploaded files (not a lot, say max 1MB per client) to several facebook apps(iframes).

I'm not sure what route I should take. Right now I'm considering heroku + amazon S3 as opposed to a VPS. I know that the heroku / amazon route is slightly pricier but I have 0 deployment/scaling experience and while I'm not against learning new stuff I'm worried it might be a bit too much for me considering that I come from a design/front-end development background.

What's do you guys think would work best in this case?

Carvefx
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    Can you share your pricing comparison? When I compared Heroku to VPS a while back I came away concluding that Heroku is a lot more expensive than a VPS. – Matt Greer Apr 08 '11 at 15:55
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    Amazon EC2's [Small Instance](http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/) [(@$0.085/hour)](http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/) is $63/month. The smallest dedicated Heroku Database [(Ronin)](http://www.heroku.com/pricing#1-0+ronin) running on the same small instance is $200/month. I've always found that much of a gap surprising. – Zabba Apr 08 '11 at 16:22
  • I'm quite sure that I won't be needing a dedicated DB soon as I don't expect a lot of initial traffic. – Carvefx Apr 10 '11 at 08:28

2 Answers2

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Unless you're working on tiny margins and a massive scale, I wouldn't worry about "slightly pricier" first. Go down the easiest route, get it working and worry about saving the percentage later, when you know how much it might be worth to you.

Colin Pickard
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I would recommend Heroku/S3. As long as you are dealing with "not a lot" disc space and nothing CPU intensive (like video en/decoding), you should stick to the easiest solution and go the pragmatic way. This is most probably Heroku/S3.

I am running my app (similar to your usecase, just some images per user) on Heroku/S3 and my monthly bills are way below a McDonald's menu for every week. ;)

d135-1r43
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