Engine Tard

Today I got an email from Engine Yard asking me to be an Engine Yard ambassador / promoter / evangelist. Given our painful experiences with EY, I said no thanks. To their credit, they asked why. So I sent them this list, and will document it here for LOLs and posterity.

What we didn't like about EY:

• your pricing is unjustifiably high considering the shortcomings below.
• your approach to database replication is facepalm-inducing. It's explicitly designed *not* to be used to fail over. I lost count of how many times I said WTF.
• getting SSL to work properly with all the right headers is unnecessarily painful (stunnel).
• there's no API to scale up and down by script--everything has to be done manually. WTF again, big time.
• you've fixed this (I hope), but for a long time, removing instances from an environment did not remove those from haproxy, which meant that unless you ran the recipes manually, the app master would still be sending traffic to instances that were either turned off or assigned to another customer of yours, resulting in 404s and other hilarious situations. I sang a Viking song of battle and sorrow when I realized that's what was happening and you guys confirmed it (after I was done laughing).
• when adding or removing instances from your web UI, the number of failures is greater than the number of successful changes performed. More than half the time we would have to re-run the add or remove process for the instances to be added successfully. This is for a completely vanilla Rails app with a tiny number of servers, i.e. the default / base case you guys are catering to.
• when adding more than a couple of instances, the app master's NIC gets flooded by requests used to provision the new instances, which brings the entire stack down. We LOLed heartily when we figured out that was going on. The only safe way to add instances is one or two at a time. Given how long it takes to do that (see above re. failures), it's a giant pain in the rear. 
• the default stack of app master + slaves is stupid. An active app master serving traffic and SSL termination shouldn't also be a load balancer. That's just dumb.

To be perfectly blunt, I really like the idea of your service, and I'm sure it's great for people to get started with hosting, but every time we tried to do something with our stack, it felt like EngineYard was designed and operated by amateurs who don't have any experience running, let alone hosting, or offering hosting for, a real web business. I wouldn't use EY even if there was 0 markup over AWS.

PS: it got so bad we started calling you guys EngineTard and I drew the attached. Note my Photoshop skills are not particularly advanced.

Update: I have to say EY has class and a sense of humor. After receiving this diatribe, they sent me a $25 Amazon gift card.

Update: One thing I forgot to mention is the frequent billing errors. We cancelled our account on April 2; in May I got a bill for usage we didn't incur, and on July 1 we got a bill for snapshot storage and unused IP addresses for an account that's been closed for 3 months. Sigh.