AppCloud seems to be (and I hate to use this word) "just" a thin wrapper around EC2. At least I get that impression looking at the price points - the smallest 32bit instance is just shy of 1k/year. Am I going to get more performance out of three Dynos at Heroku for about the same cost? Maybe maybe not. But where am I going to put my staging test/servers? On a 20/month VPS? On an instance @AppCloud that I spin up and down? No, I'll tell you where, I'm going to stick it on a Dyno or two at Heroku and not worry about it. And then when I need to scale or the product is ready for production where is it going to be hosted. That's right - the same place it's been validated and tested on.
By the way, Engine Yard is not the only place that has this barrier to entry problem. Most of the cloud providers do. Joyent.com, Media Temple, Rackspace cloud all have Barriers whether it's poor documentation, higher than normal base costs and bandwidth fees or just inconvenience like having to wait on a call from someone in Texas in order to be allowed to create instances.
If the other players want to compete with Heroku on the service and ease of use side or Amazon on flexibility and scale then they are going to have to do much, much, much better.
It's also increasingly annoying to see shots taken at Heroku in their blog posts and on Twitter. It's unprofessional. Compete on features and services, please.
Really? We've always been friendly with everyone in the Rails deployment space, and I don't ever remember taking shots at Heroku specifically, though it's certainly possible that we've expressed disagreement on technologies or practices that they and others may use. I'd appreciate it if you'd point out what you've seen, as it's certainly not part of our philosophy or business practice.
With respect to your comment about our "aging" platform, we all age a bit every day. There's tremendous work underway at Engine Yard, some visible, some not. This is no-doubt true of every competitive platform. Many of our customers choose to describe this as maturation! :-)
We're very aware that there are other services available, and that they fill a need for certain users. Specialization is important, and it's difficult to be all things to all people.
