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I have no idea why there's nothing here saying "don't". Go and get a Heroku account, hook it up to your Github repository's master branch for deploys, use Githu

I have no idea why there's nothing here saying "don't". Go and get a Heroku account, hook it up to your Github repository's master branch for deploys, use Github Actions for CI, and then get on with life. Yes, you'll pay more for a Heroku Postgres instance than you would for a VPS on Digital Ocean with Postgres running on it, likewise you'll pay more for Heroku Dynos than another VPS to run your application server. On the other side though, your backup, rollback, deploy, and scaling strategies can all be "Heroku does that", and you can focus on the much more valuable job of building a business.

darkr 5y ago
+1. For pre-A series/pre-revenue/pre-1k paying customers and other early stage businesses you can do a lot worse than starting out on Heroku, especially if you don't have sysadmin/cloud/devops expertise (and even if you do, that time could/should be spent on much more important things at this stage).
strzibny 5y ago
Until Heroku has a huge downtime (like recently) and you are f*ked. If you have your own VMs, you can quickly move them to a different provider, but it's hard to start figuring out servers when Heroku is down and your business stopped. That said, I would also recommend Heroku to many.
- jon-wood 5y ago
  I can almost guarantee that over a period of years you'll see significantly less downtime that can be attributed to Heroku than you would on VMs that you manage. Even if that isn't the case, if Heroku are responsible for it then you can mostly just kick back and let them fix it, rather than spending 24 hours without sleep migrating VMs between providers. The context here is also that of a single entrepreneur building a business. At that point in the lifecycle of a product downtime really isn't that big of a deal, customers tend to be pretty understanding so long as you recover.
  - ohashi 5y ago
    Anyone who kicks back while their web hosting is down... is a psychopath. That's just not going to happen. Are you accountable to literally nobody? Even as a solopreneur, there are customers/visitors. If my site is down, I am losing money/credibility/visitors/etc. Sure, you will probably get past it, but it means preparing to communicate to those people during/after. It also means understanding what went wrong and what could be done to prevent it. Just kick back and not worry about it sounds like you're doing nothing of consequence to anyone.
bizzleDawg 5y ago
This! Plus it includes SSL provisioning, staging environments, background workers etc. Other competitors like render.com are starting to look like they'll be competitive on features and are way cheaper too.
- tmcw 5y ago
  Yep! Used Heroku at a previous gig (now a mid-size startup), worked great, now on Render.com and it's also great. Also factor in fly.io and railway as quickly-growing platforms in the same PaaS sort of space.
  - crcastle 5y ago
    I head up Dev Advocacy at Render (previously at Heroku). Happy to answer any questions about Render.
    - bizzleDawg 5y ago
      I'm really only waiting on PITR for postgres before moving all my workloads over to render. Do you know when that will be available?
      - anurag 5y ago
        (Render CEO) We're targeting early next year, but it might be sooner if we can hire faster!
Torwald 5y ago
Exactly. And when you are truly "beyond POC level and beyond heroku (for whatever reason)" then of course it is time to hire people. I see this all the time. Entrepreneurs trying to solve the people problem by avoidance. The problem with the super efficient player is twofold. First, it's not really scaleable. Second, what if the person gets sick or is in vacation?
gwbas1c 5y ago
I really like Heroku, when I work on NodeJS projects. BUT: In the last year I've had some rather serious downtime issues that were 100% Heroku's fault. (Poor encapsulation of Postgres configuration via the connection string, and they mistakenly claimed that I violated their TOS when I didn't. They apologized and fixed the situation.) I'd really like to see some good alternatives to Heroku. Not just because of their screwups, but because the languages that I want to work on have limited support in Heroku.
- mthwsjc_ 5y ago
  which languages do you want to work on?
  - gwbas1c 5y ago
    C# and Rust. Edit: Yes, I know there are community supported ways to do this, But I want something that is as slick as the NodeJS ecosystem on Heroku.
sebiw 5y ago
Heroku Postgres – after all those years – still is vulnerable to MITM attacks. You can't reliably verify the authenticity of the connection between Heroku's Dyno and the Postgres database. They use self-signed certificates on Heroku Postgres servers without a certificate authority present in the chain. No chance to establish reliable peer verification. A shame, I would love to use Heroku more often without compromising security.
bingohbangoh 5y ago
Heroku is by far the best for this but just to throw in some alternatives: * Digital Ocean Apps -- somewhat finicky but works very similar to Heroku, it gets closer to bare metal so I prefer it * render.com * AWS Elastic Beanstalk -- though setting this up is non-trivial, it is very similar to Heroku with its "set it and forget it" * AWS Container Services -- if you're using Docker * Google App Engine * Supabase -- geared for SPAs but this may be the ticket depending on what you're building, is open source You may want to use your own VPS but spend for a managed database solution as this has the most potential for catastrophe.
- abnerg 5y ago
  Add TinyStacks to this list. They are just getting going, but I got a demo recently - sort of a cross between Vercel and Heroku, but on AWS.
- fulafel 5y ago
  Also AWS Copilot if you like CLI based tooling, similar to Elastic Beanstalk but easier (at least if you're comfortable making a Dockerfile)
  - bingohbangoh 5y ago
    Was not aware of Copilot! Looks much better than Elastic Beanstalk
- jon-wood 5y ago
  I would advise against Elastic Beanstalk, last time I used it the product had the stink of being on life support - they've not really added any new features to it in several years, and even before that it was incredibly flakey.
  - pirate787 5y ago
    I use Elastic Beanstalk daily it is maintained and supports everything on AWS, they've added ALB and WAP for example. It runs on Cloud Formation. Never experienced anything "flakey"
orky56 5y ago
Totally agree. There's some impostor syndrome in play here. If you don't need the scale, why waste your time managing a more complex setup? Heroku might be slightly more expensive in the short term but your time is better spent building/selling than future-proofing or just doing it because larger operations have to.
tootie 5y ago
I'd even go higher up the value chain with something like Vercel or Netlify if your stack fits in their offering. Heroku is a definitely a good option if you need more flexibility. The costs won't be a bottleneck until you actually have enough scale that you can afford DevOps staff.
- hyuuu 5y ago
  Vercel has the best dev UX in my opinion, everything just "works" the way you expected it the first time, and if not their documentation is very straight forward.
kirillzubovsky 5y ago
This is what I've been doing for years, but Heroku Postgres is so bloody expensive, it just doesn't make sense for apps that don't make much money. So I just moved my data to an RDS instance, shared between multiple apps. Cost savings are great, headache savings much less so. I would say if you are going to move off Heroku, do it with the apps/projects where you can f-up, or have downtime without much repercussion. AWS stuff is a deep dark forest, undocumented and confusing. I'd say for anything that is critical, just keep paying Heroku. It isn't worth it.
rezbull 5y ago
Are you actually doing this for a production app with income you rely on? Because Heroku has horrendous uptime these days. Lot's of random emergencies on both worker and web dynos. Don't forget you share routing with thousands of other apps too so expect random hiccups there too. It's easy to give this advice but does not scale well with complexity.

darkr 5y ago

+1. For pre-A series/pre-revenue/pre-1k paying customers and other early stage businesses you can do a lot worse than starting out on Heroku, especially if you don't have sysadmin/cloud/devops expertise (and even if you do, that time could/should be spent on much more important things at this stage).

strzibny 5y ago

Until Heroku has a huge downtime (like recently) and you are f*ked. If you have your own VMs, you can quickly move them to a different provider, but it's hard to start figuring out servers when Heroku is down and your business stopped. That said, I would also recommend Heroku to many.

jon-wood 5y ago
I can almost guarantee that over a period of years you'll see significantly less downtime that can be attributed to Heroku than you would on VMs that you manage. Even if that isn't the case, if Heroku are responsible for it then you can mostly just kick back and let them fix it, rather than spending 24 hours without sleep migrating VMs between providers. The context here is also that of a single entrepreneur building a business. At that point in the lifecycle of a product downtime really isn't that big of a deal, customers tend to be pretty understanding so long as you recover.
- ohashi 5y ago
  Anyone who kicks back while their web hosting is down... is a psychopath. That's just not going to happen. Are you accountable to literally nobody? Even as a solopreneur, there are customers/visitors. If my site is down, I am losing money/credibility/visitors/etc. Sure, you will probably get past it, but it means preparing to communicate to those people during/after. It also means understanding what went wrong and what could be done to prevent it. Just kick back and not worry about it sounds like you're doing nothing of consequence to anyone.

bizzleDawg 5y ago

This! Plus it includes SSL provisioning, staging environments, background workers etc. Other competitors like render.com are starting to look like they'll be competitive on features and are way cheaper too.

tmcw 5y ago
Yep! Used Heroku at a previous gig (now a mid-size startup), worked great, now on Render.com and it's also great. Also factor in fly.io and railway as quickly-growing platforms in the same PaaS sort of space.
- crcastle 5y ago
  I head up Dev Advocacy at Render (previously at Heroku). Happy to answer any questions about Render.
  - bizzleDawg 5y ago
    I'm really only waiting on PITR for postgres before moving all my workloads over to render. Do you know when that will be available?
    - anurag 5y ago
      (Render CEO) We're targeting early next year, but it might be sooner if we can hire faster!

Torwald 5y ago

Exactly. And when you are truly "beyond POC level and beyond heroku (for whatever reason)" then of course it is time to hire people. I see this all the time. Entrepreneurs trying to solve the people problem by avoidance. The problem with the super efficient player is twofold. First, it's not really scaleable. Second, what if the person gets sick or is in vacation?

gwbas1c 5y ago

I really like Heroku, when I work on NodeJS projects. BUT: In the last year I've had some rather serious downtime issues that were 100% Heroku's fault. (Poor encapsulation of Postgres configuration via the connection string, and they mistakenly claimed that I violated their TOS when I didn't. They apologized and fixed the situation.) I'd really like to see some good alternatives to Heroku. Not just because of their screwups, but because the languages that I want to work on have limited support in Heroku.

mthwsjc_ 5y ago
which languages do you want to work on?
- gwbas1c 5y ago
  C# and Rust. Edit: Yes, I know there are community supported ways to do this, But I want something that is as slick as the NodeJS ecosystem on Heroku.

sebiw 5y ago

Heroku Postgres – after all those years – still is vulnerable to MITM attacks. You can't reliably verify the authenticity of the connection between Heroku's Dyno and the Postgres database. They use self-signed certificates on Heroku Postgres servers without a certificate authority present in the chain. No chance to establish reliable peer verification. A shame, I would love to use Heroku more often without compromising security.

bingohbangoh 5y ago

Heroku is by far the best for this but just to throw in some alternatives: * Digital Ocean Apps -- somewhat finicky but works very similar to Heroku, it gets closer to bare metal so I prefer it * render.com * AWS Elastic Beanstalk -- though setting this up is non-trivial, it is very similar to Heroku with its "set it and forget it" * AWS Container Services -- if you're using Docker * Google App Engine * Supabase -- geared for SPAs but this may be the ticket depending on what you're building, is open source You may want to use your own VPS but spend for a managed database solution as this has the most potential for catastrophe.

abnerg 5y ago
Add TinyStacks to this list. They are just getting going, but I got a demo recently - sort of a cross between Vercel and Heroku, but on AWS.
fulafel 5y ago
Also AWS Copilot if you like CLI based tooling, similar to Elastic Beanstalk but easier (at least if you're comfortable making a Dockerfile)
- bingohbangoh 5y ago
  Was not aware of Copilot! Looks much better than Elastic Beanstalk
jon-wood 5y ago
I would advise against Elastic Beanstalk, last time I used it the product had the stink of being on life support - they've not really added any new features to it in several years, and even before that it was incredibly flakey.
- pirate787 5y ago
  I use Elastic Beanstalk daily it is maintained and supports everything on AWS, they've added ALB and WAP for example. It runs on Cloud Formation. Never experienced anything "flakey"

orky56 5y ago

Totally agree. There's some impostor syndrome in play here. If you don't need the scale, why waste your time managing a more complex setup? Heroku might be slightly more expensive in the short term but your time is better spent building/selling than future-proofing or just doing it because larger operations have to.

tootie 5y ago

I'd even go higher up the value chain with something like Vercel or Netlify if your stack fits in their offering. Heroku is a definitely a good option if you need more flexibility. The costs won't be a bottleneck until you actually have enough scale that you can afford DevOps staff.

hyuuu 5y ago
Vercel has the best dev UX in my opinion, everything just "works" the way you expected it the first time, and if not their documentation is very straight forward.

kirillzubovsky 5y ago

This is what I've been doing for years, but Heroku Postgres is so bloody expensive, it just doesn't make sense for apps that don't make much money. So I just moved my data to an RDS instance, shared between multiple apps. Cost savings are great, headache savings much less so. I would say if you are going to move off Heroku, do it with the apps/projects where you can f-up, or have downtime without much repercussion. AWS stuff is a deep dark forest, undocumented and confusing. I'd say for anything that is critical, just keep paying Heroku. It isn't worth it.

rezbull 5y ago

Are you actually doing this for a production app with income you rely on? Because Heroku has horrendous uptime these days. Lot's of random emergencies on both worker and web dynos. Don't forget you share routing with thousands of other apps too so expect random hiccups there too. It's easy to give this advice but does not scale well with complexity.