Garry Shutler

Heroku in Europe

January 26, 2012 · 2 min read

I tweeted yesterday (25th Jan 2012) to ask if anyone knew of a solution as convenient as Heroku but based in the UK or Europe.

The reason I asked was at Zopa we are thinking of migrating our front-end over to a Ruby stack and Heroku was the obvious option for hosting such a solution. However, as 95% or more of our traffic comes from the UK it doesn’t make complete sense to host our website outside of the UK or Europe at worst.

I got a lot of interest from Twitter as to whether I found anything but no suggestions of similar services based this side of the pond. At the same time I sent an email to Heroku’s support asking if they had any plans to give an UK or European hosting option.

Heroku got back to me yesterday evening and said they have no immediate plans for server resources outside the US but they are working on Safe Harbor certification if your concerns are of a more legal nature. They also confirmed that they are hosted within the US East region of AWS which is better than West for Europeans.

Their suggested strategy is to use a CDN alongside Heroku so that the majority of your assets will come from a local source and only your dynamic content will come from the US.

This probably rules out Heroku for us at Zopa as a CDN adds needless complexity for us given our traffic volumes and the fact that almost all of our traffic is from the same location. However, I thought I should knock a blog post together to share what I found.


Photo of Garry Shutler

Hey, I’m Garry Shutler

CTO and co-founder of Cronofy.

Husband, father, and cyclist. Proponent of the Oxford comma.