There are now five options for Redis hosting on Heroku, not including Amazon EC2. So we fired up Excel and tried out the ones with public beta and production add-ons. We thought it would be helpful to share what we found.

All of the providers are in the US-East-1 region so you shouldn’t have any latency issues (Amazon’s uptime is a different problem). Everyone is also running Redis 2.6 so version compatibility shouldn’t be an issue.

Besides using a provider who integrates with Heroku, the other way to go is to manage your own EC2 instances running Redis. It’s the most economical option if you don’t factor in your time. It’s a relatively painless process to setup. But when there is a problem you are on the hook for fixing it.

Redis To Go

Plans: 7 options ranging from 20 MB for $9 (45¢ per MB) to $4,000 for 50 GB (8¢ per MB). They also have a free 5 MB plan

They are the ones that started it all, and then started the influx of new Redis hosts after raising their prices in July.

Pros

• They have a long standing solid reputation
• Responsive support

Cons

• The most expensive option
• Daily backups only
• Upgrading to a larger instance is a manual process

Heroku Add-on Status: Production

openredis

Plans: 7 options ranging from $8 for 50 MB (16¢ per MB) to $700 for 13 GB (5¢ per MB)

Pros

• Redundancy and hourly backups are included
• Notifications at 80% capacity
• Temporary bump in memory if needed
• Responsive support

Cons

• Short downtime when upgrading to a larger plan depending on the amount of data you have

Heroku Add-on Status: Production

RedisGreen

Plans: Only one option 750 MB for $169 (23¢ per MB)

Pros

• Hourly backups
• Nice dashboard with links to download backups
• Resque dashboard
• The most cleverly named option

Cons

• Only 750 MB plans available right now, more coming soon

Heroku Add-on Status: Production

MyRedis

Plans: 10 options ranging from 60 MB for $8 (13¢ per MB) to 34 GB for $1,150 (3¢ per MB). They also have a free 5 MB plan.

Pros

• The most economical option excluding hosting on EC2

Cons

• In private beta
• Short downtime when upgrading plans

Heroku Add-on Status: Private Beta

Redis Cloud

Plans: 1-20 GB, pricing is not announced

Pros

• Memory size scales automatically to the max you set
• Data redundancy, your data is sharded over multiple servers

Cons

• In beta

Heroku Add-on Status: Public Beta

EC2

Plans: 11 options ranging from 613 MB for $14 (2¢ per MB) to 70 GB for $1,296 (2¢ per MB)

Pros

• The least expensive way to go

Cons

• You are responsible for the setup, administration, and security

Conclusion

We found that Redis To Go was the only provider who wasn’t competitive on price or features, which is too bad because they have been solid. Openredis is our favorite option right now, their pricing is good, their service is full featured, and their support is great. We’ll see how MyRedis progresses. Their pricing is excellent but we didn’t test their service because the add-on is currently private beta. We are excited about the flexibility of Redis Cloud, but we are waiting for pricing before we move anything over.