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Have to disagree with this. Redis is dead simple to install and configure out of the box.

This seems like a solution to a nonexistent problem.

I would add a seemingly expensive solution to this non-existant problem. It may kind of makes sense for heroku because afaik they don't offer redis support out of the box.
Yeah, I would definitely consider using the $25 plan with Heroku. The only other real option is to run Redis on its own EC2 instance, which costs $62 minimum (well, once you're sure the thing's sticking around, you could make it a reserved instance I guess). Now, that's a lot more powerful, but if I'm using something that doesn't even need the 100MB of RAM, I might as well save some money and use Redis to Go.

Plus you get the added bonus of still not having to worry about any piece of your infrastructure.

Redis is dead simple, but having another server isn't. While most people can easily handle this, managing systems can often spin out of control. If you are starting a project would you rather handle another server or just have someone else manage it and be done in under a min?
There are ways to automate server configuration though. AMIs, Chef, Puppet, even Linode's StackScripts.
Wouldn't the network latency kill the performance benefits? Redis is also dead simple to setup. The front page is not clear what the $200 time frame is. Per month Per year ... per hour?
Good point. The site has been updated and the pricing is per month.
Since you appear to be the developer of this product, this is as good a spot as any to point out that the link to your website in the footer of the blog is broken.
Are the prices monthly or annual or one-off or...?

And who said Redis was hard to install?

So my server, which is "here", is going to be talking to a redis which is where exactly? "over there"? How do I prevent someone from "somewhere else" from talking to it?
The servers are located in EC2, and there is authentication.
Er...a Linode 512, at $20/month, is $5/month cheaper than their smallest plan, and $90 cheaper than the comparable plan. Unless you really, really cannot do a simple

    tar xf redis.tar.gz
    cd redis
    make
then I don't understand why on Earth you'd do this.
It is cheaper, but I don't think you are running an OS that will only use 12 MB of memory. This also doesn't include backups or system monitoring. And if you are EC2, well this just isn't an option if you are concerned about network latency.
It's still much cheaper, even if Redis can only use half the available memory. Backups are easy to ship off to S3. If you're on EC2, why not just spin up another instance for Redis at half the price?
Network latency is not that much of an issue when you have your application in the cloud as well.

And I'll only believe claims about backups if the contract contains an enforcable clause that I'm entitled to a pound of the CEO's flesh if/when they lose my data for whatever reason.

(Amazon S3 occasionally loses your data when two/three servers fail at once. If they had such a clause, their executive board would probably be short of a leg or maybe two).

Network latency is not that much of an issue when you have your application in the cloud as well.

What?

Nice job, I guess plans and getting into the Heroku alpha program nets you more upvotes on HN. (than http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1456431)

The game is afoot!

Oh cool, I missed that even though I'm on HN a lot.

You do awesome stuff, so I'm excited to see this when it launches.