Heroku

Heroku was founded by James Lindenbaum, Adam Wiggins and Orion Henry and built for hosting Ruby on Rails applications. It popularised git push as a deployment interface, and one of its co-founders wrote the twelve-factor app methodology. Salesforce acquired the company in 2010, and Heroku describes itself on its own site as a business unit of Salesforce.

Officially supported languages are Node.js, Ruby, Python, Java, PHP, Go, Scala, Clojure and .NET. Applications deploy over a git remote or the Heroku CLI, and first-party data services cover Postgres, a Redis-compatible key-value store and Apache Kafka. The shared Common Runtime offers a US and an EU region; Private Spaces add named regions across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia on isolated infrastructure.

Worth knowing

There is no free tier. The cheapest plan is a flat monthly subscription covering a pool of dyno hours shared across the account, on which a web dyno sleeps after a spell without traffic and takes a moment to wake, and it is restricted to personal applications — anything inside a Heroku Team starts a step higher. The ladder climbs steeply from there, and Private Spaces are priced per dyno on top of the space itself.