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Heroku is still a great choice if you're willing to pay to never think about infrastructure. On the other hand if you're willing to ask for help there are plen

Heroku is still a great choice if you're willing to pay to never think about infrastructure. On the other hand if you're willing to ask for help there are plenty of freelance IT admins who would set up a digital ocean box with the DIY equivalent of Heroku.

jpochtar 8y ago
Not trying to be snarky but... how is it cheaper to hire a freelance IT person to set up something for you, and help you when it breaks/changes, than $7/mo for Heroku?
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  The issue with Heroku is it rapidly gets more than $7/month if you hit any sort of scale.
  - always_good 8y ago
    In my experience this is vastly overstated. Also, just because you use Heroku for your app servers (dynos) doesn't mean you have to use it for everything.
  - hellofunk 8y ago
    Absolutely. We went from free tier to about 100/month in nearly no time with Heroku. It’s worth it though. Heroku takes care of all sorts of stuff, and that fee is still cheaper than hiring a sys admin for a small business.
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    That is quite literally the price you pay for convenience. In many cases, that's a very rational tradeoff - your time is better spent on developing and marketing your app than dealing with devops. If your Heroku bill is a relevant business problem, then you're probably grossly under-charging for your app. I think the main competition for Heroku these days is AWS and GCP. The workflow for deploying directly to managed cloud services has improved drastically over the last few years, so you might not need the niceties that Heroku offer.
Rjevski 8y ago
I would not recommend this unless you hire these people for a regular maintenance role. Leaving a box with no monitoring and no on-site skill capable of fixing it is a bad idea. That box will explode at some point and it's going to explode at the worst possible moment, and you'll loose tons of business (and/or data) while you scramble to get someone to repair it. Unless you have people ready to jump in and fix it should it break, don't risk it and just let Heroku handle it.
arwhatever 8y ago
Strongly agree. I loved AWS Lambda both for pricing and for developer convenience/efficiency, but managing the network infrastructure beneath it finally irked me too much, so I switched to pushing a Docker container to Heroku and haven't looked back. I am tempted to believe that a lot of teams might be forcing themselves into over-engineering/overkill to jumping right to AWS where it's not needed. I have read similar comments to the ones here about scaling and cost, so I might bump into that at some point.

jpochtar 8y ago

Not trying to be snarky but... how is it cheaper to hire a freelance IT person to set up something for you, and help you when it breaks/changes, than $7/mo for Heroku?

ceejayoz 8y ago
The issue with Heroku is it rapidly gets more than $7/month if you hit any sort of scale.
- always_good 8y ago
  In my experience this is vastly overstated. Also, just because you use Heroku for your app servers (dynos) doesn't mean you have to use it for everything.
- hellofunk 8y ago
  Absolutely. We went from free tier to about 100/month in nearly no time with Heroku. It’s worth it though. Heroku takes care of all sorts of stuff, and that fee is still cheaper than hiring a sys admin for a small business.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  That is quite literally the price you pay for convenience. In many cases, that's a very rational tradeoff - your time is better spent on developing and marketing your app than dealing with devops. If your Heroku bill is a relevant business problem, then you're probably grossly under-charging for your app. I think the main competition for Heroku these days is AWS and GCP. The workflow for deploying directly to managed cloud services has improved drastically over the last few years, so you might not need the niceties that Heroku offer.

Rjevski 8y ago

I would not recommend this unless you hire these people for a regular maintenance role. Leaving a box with no monitoring and no on-site skill capable of fixing it is a bad idea. That box will explode at some point and it's going to explode at the worst possible moment, and you'll loose tons of business (and/or data) while you scramble to get someone to repair it. Unless you have people ready to jump in and fix it should it break, don't risk it and just let Heroku handle it.

arwhatever 8y ago

Strongly agree. I loved AWS Lambda both for pricing and for developer convenience/efficiency, but managing the network infrastructure beneath it finally irked me too much, so I switched to pushing a Docker container to Heroku and haven't looked back. I am tempted to believe that a lot of teams might be forcing themselves into over-engineering/overkill to jumping right to AWS where it's not needed. I have read similar comments to the ones here about scaling and cost, so I might bump into that at some point.