I first used Heroku to deploy and host Facebook apps, and Iâ??m a big fan ever since.

Lately, Iâ??ve been doing development with node.js and since Heroku supports it (wonder if they were first to offer it), it was a no-brainer:

• deployment via command line with git: nice way to enforce best dev practices
• package management with NPM – everything will be fetched and installed for you
• built-in SSL support on *.herokuapp.com subdomains
• easy monitoring: just type ‘heroku logs’
• easy scaling: just type ‘ps:scale web=x’ or ‘ps:scale worker=x’
• support of environment variables: one example – running multiple instances from the same git repo
• pretty good docs and tutorials
• tons of add-ons: you are free to do pretty much anything (I use Mongolab add-on for Mongo hosting)
• affordable!

Nodejitsu is another service focusing on node.js primarily, but Iâ??ve been reluctant to switch because I just like Heroku so much.

Itâ??s also super cool that they support multiple environments via buildpacks, Iâ??d love to look under the hood and find out how they made it work (and hereâ??s a great post describing their polyglot platform in high-level)

In contrast to the one-language-per-career programmer, today’s up-and-coming developers can often utilize many languages effectively. Borrowing a term from linguistics, we can call these versatile new developers “polyglot programmers.”

For the latest Show&Tell demo, I talked about benefits of using Heroku (as one of the PaaS options) for rapid deployment and easy hosting, so hereâ??s the deck.

This week Iâ??m working on a recommendation chart for cloud hosting, so Iâ??ll share that as well soon.