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General Discussion

troy beckett
troy beckett
12,035 Points

what is heroku?? and why is this sort of product needed?

I've been learning php recently and using xampp as my development environment. I was just reading about the other day about other languages like ruby and people kept mentioning things like Heroku.

Could someone please explain to me what it is? Why We need it? It's purpose? What is Heroku compared to something like xampp??

Thanks in advance for any advice, I'll be researching as well.

2 Answers

Heroku is a web server. The difference between using XAMPP and Heroku is that XAMPP is for local development and Heroku for remote deployment.

Greg Kaleka
Greg Kaleka
39,021 Points

Hi Troy,

To add onto Shon's answer, Heroku is a web service that includes a web server. There are various levels of abstraction with server management, from the lowest level of hosting a site yourself with a server you run from your home to a cloud server you manage yourself like Linode or DigitalOcean, to a hosting service through a company like Dreamhost, to a more abstract service like Heroku or Amazon Web Services, which do a lot of the management work for you (but are much more expensive). Once you're ready to publish websites , you'll have to figure out what's right for you. Personally, I use Dreamhost for basic stuff and DigitalOcean for more complex web apps.

Happy coding!