6 ms·

Hey, I built this over a few weeks. If you have any feedback please let me know!

y4mi 8y ago
congrats on shipping! I'm definitely not your target audience, so take what I'm about to write with a grain of salt. I didn't register, and only checked out your Landing Page and your linked Documentation... The first issue i had was how you didn't mention healthchecks or log aggregation anywhere... how would a developer troubleshoot issues if they'd chose to go with your service? and do they need to use external monitoring to be notified about issues? my next issue was with the database... how would developers do their database migrations? do they need to connect to their database directly and execute them from their workstation? If so, does that mean that the database is open to dog and world? How would a developer set secrets and other runtime variables that cant be part of the repository? I couldn't find anything about that in the docs either. Honestly, nothing about the product made me think PaaS. Its more like an offer to host a single threaded web application of some select languages... But i wish you luck! The competition is fierce though, especially with Amazon pushing for serverless, Heroku and self hosted alternatives like Dokku around.
matt2000 8y ago
Very cool, congrats on getting to this point. I have a few questions as a long time heroku user: - Can you scale up to more app server instances? - Where are your servers running? Based on location and the pricing progression, I'm guessing Scaleway? - How are logs handled? Thanks!
- vincelt 8y ago
  Thank you :) - Not yet, but process scaling is coming very soon! - Good catch! It's running in the Scaleway Amsterdam datacenter. Might expand to more regions/providers in the future - Logs are pretty basic. In your dashboard, you can see the logs for the last build and the last ~50 lines of your application logs
  - matt2000 8y ago
    I've used Scaleway for one thing where I needed lots of cores and latency didn't matter, but I'm not sure I'd use them for much more. Heard a bunch of questionable things about their networking too, how has your experience been so far?
    - vincelt 8y ago
      I've had all my apps and projects on there for a few years without issues. I believe their Amsterdam datacenter has more bandwidth than the one in Paris so I switched everything there. I should do some proper tests and write a post comparing networking across datacenters. Also, for the few times I needed support, it was quite responsive and helpful. Maybe they don't have the most performant cores but it's suitable enough for majority of my usecases and very worth the price.
cagenut 8y ago
how are you handling the cloudflare integration (partnership?)
mark_l_watson 8y ago
Congrats on shipping. Your pricing, very roughly, looks like about 1/2 that of Heroku. One question: for the two lower cost plans with weekly backup: if there is a hardware failure and you need to restart all apps on a new server, how much time would this take? I am not asking for an estimate if the data center you use goes down, just asking about an estimate for spinning up apps on a new server. I ask because I like to host small experiments. If apps are down occasionally for a half hour or an hour that is OK, but a few hours isn’t.
- vincelt 8y ago
  Thanks :) The time to spin a new server and set up the apps back on it is no more than a few minutes (depending if you had a DB and how large it is). You can see it in action when you scale an app up, it will spin a new server, import back the DB on it, build your app and switch DNS to the new location. Rarely takes more than 5 minutes. I think tho if something happens at the hardware level and we lose our servers we would seriously consider switching providers.
gitgud 8y ago
Is this using dokku in the background?

y4mi 8y ago

congrats on shipping! I'm definitely not your target audience, so take what I'm about to write with a grain of salt. I didn't register, and only checked out your Landing Page and your linked Documentation... The first issue i had was how you didn't mention healthchecks or log aggregation anywhere... how would a developer troubleshoot issues if they'd chose to go with your service? and do they need to use external monitoring to be notified about issues? my next issue was with the database... how would developers do their database migrations? do they need to connect to their database directly and execute them from their workstation? If so, does that mean that the database is open to dog and world? How would a developer set secrets and other runtime variables that cant be part of the repository? I couldn't find anything about that in the docs either. Honestly, nothing about the product made me think PaaS. Its more like an offer to host a single threaded web application of some select languages... But i wish you luck! The competition is fierce though, especially with Amazon pushing for serverless, Heroku and self hosted alternatives like Dokku around.

matt2000 8y ago

Very cool, congrats on getting to this point. I have a few questions as a long time heroku user: - Can you scale up to more app server instances? - Where are your servers running? Based on location and the pricing progression, I'm guessing Scaleway? - How are logs handled? Thanks!

vincelt 8y ago
Thank you :) - Not yet, but process scaling is coming very soon! - Good catch! It's running in the Scaleway Amsterdam datacenter. Might expand to more regions/providers in the future - Logs are pretty basic. In your dashboard, you can see the logs for the last build and the last ~50 lines of your application logs
- matt2000 8y ago
  I've used Scaleway for one thing where I needed lots of cores and latency didn't matter, but I'm not sure I'd use them for much more. Heard a bunch of questionable things about their networking too, how has your experience been so far?
  - vincelt 8y ago
    I've had all my apps and projects on there for a few years without issues. I believe their Amsterdam datacenter has more bandwidth than the one in Paris so I switched everything there. I should do some proper tests and write a post comparing networking across datacenters. Also, for the few times I needed support, it was quite responsive and helpful. Maybe they don't have the most performant cores but it's suitable enough for majority of my usecases and very worth the price.

cagenut 8y ago

how are you handling the cloudflare integration (partnership?)

mark_l_watson 8y ago

Congrats on shipping. Your pricing, very roughly, looks like about 1/2 that of Heroku. One question: for the two lower cost plans with weekly backup: if there is a hardware failure and you need to restart all apps on a new server, how much time would this take? I am not asking for an estimate if the data center you use goes down, just asking about an estimate for spinning up apps on a new server. I ask because I like to host small experiments. If apps are down occasionally for a half hour or an hour that is OK, but a few hours isn’t.

vincelt 8y ago
Thanks :) The time to spin a new server and set up the apps back on it is no more than a few minutes (depending if you had a DB and how large it is). You can see it in action when you scale an app up, it will spin a new server, import back the DB on it, build your app and switch DNS to the new location. Rarely takes more than 5 minutes. I think tho if something happens at the hardware level and we lose our servers we would seriously consider switching providers.

gitgud 8y ago

Is this using dokku in the background?