10 ms·

Heroku Is Down

110 points by pankajtanwar 5y ago

hankchinaski 5y ago
I used to be on heroku but to be honest it’s extremely expensive for what it provides. Same value for money I moved to digital ocean app platform and I am very happy with the service.
- ecedeno 5y ago
  One thing to worry about with DO App Platform is egress costs. They charge more than AWS!!
  - aosaigh 5y ago
    Can you elaborate? Is that on files served from the App Platform CDN itself or files that are hosted on Digital Ocean Spaces? I'm trying out App Platform for a few projects at the moment
    - ecedeno 5y ago
      I don´t think it applies to content served from the App Platform CDN (Cloudflare), but egress from origin is 10¢/GB after the included bandwidth is exceeded. Excess egress from Spaces or Droplets is much cheaper at 1¢/GB, and they are more generous with the included amount.
agd 5y ago
I was just hit by this - can't deploy, can't sign in, and can't access logs via cli tool. Fingers crossed everything is fixed soon.
rrjjww 5y ago
Hmm. I got an email yesterday saying my Heroku database was automatically upgrading, something I’ve never seen before. Maybe related?
- grombear 5y ago
  Those are pretty common. Definitely unrelated
- nomilk 5y ago
  Did it have subject line > Maintenance is required for your database If so, they're pretty common; almost certainly not related.
henryaj 5y ago
FYI it's not really "down" - Heroku apps are still up and running. But the API (and so Dashboard and CLI) are down.
aosaigh 5y ago
Do people still recommend Heroku? I'm looking for a IAAS/PAAS for "simple" web apps and websites. At the moment I'm using Digital Ocean App Platform and am relatively happy so far, but I can see that it's pretty new and not very well documented. I use AWS extensively for other projects but it's just too complex. I'm looking for somethign that ticks most of the boxes and makes it easy to deploy apps and sites without total server oversight.
- jelling 5y ago
  Yes. Pipelines is the new killer feature; super easy dev ops with review apps.
- colinramsay 5y ago
  I really like it, but I'm only using it for fairly low traffic apps. I've heard it gets expensive quickly.
- BoorishBears 5y ago
  I had to leave DO's App Platform because either SSE or WS just wouldn't work (It's been a while but leaning towards it being SSE) After a minute or so connections would get terminated.
  - pgm8705 5y ago
    Odd. We've been using DO App Platform with Web Sockets in production for over a year and haven't had any issues.
    - BoorishBears 5y ago
      Nothing odd, I said I was leaning towards SSE
- nomilk 5y ago
  I begrudgingly^ recommend them. ^ begrudgingly because they nearly deleted a linearly-growing production database with a week's notice and without any forewarning or revocation of INSERTs (as their docs say should happen): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30080563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30080563 Aside from that scare, and their support being about a 6/10 (which isn't too bad, all things considered), then I'd say it's pretty damn good, it certainly abstracts away a lot of complexity.
yesdocs 5y ago
Heroku is crap. You can’t deploy without dropping requests, it’s tools are lame and any serious monitoring costs you big $. ‘It just works’ is a layman’s response to the fact that it really doesn’t.
- agd 5y ago
  For starting new projects it does 'just work'. Super simple to set up and maintain. Yes, it might not work as well when you start to get more traffic, but for getting setup I have no complaints (aside from this downtime!).
- pythonaut_16 5y ago
  I wouldn't call it crap. It certainly has limitations, but for many projects those are an acceptable tradeoff for lower friction. For many projects those limitations cost less than not launching the project at all. Heroku definitely has a ton more competition these days though. Containerization has really encroached on their main value proposition. Fly.io, AWS ECS and Fargate, Managed Kubernetes, even just Docker on a VPS mostly don't require much more effort than Heroku.
- nomilk 5y ago
  I'd be interested to hear recommendations on what a heroku user should try instead? (particularly for rails/postgres stack, but in general also).
  - dtech 5y ago
    Netlify or Amplify if you want simpler. Managed k8s (e.g. AWS EKS + Postgres RDS) will quite soon be worth it if you need more power than Heroku.
    - mikepurvis 5y ago
      What are some of the limitations of managed k8s? For a lot of scenarios, it really seems like it could be an ideal set of tradeoffs in terms of who manages what and being able to still maintain some shred of platform agnosticism.
CPLX 5y ago
Good thread timing. I was literally just about to deploy a toy proof of concept rails app this afternoon and start having some people on my team play with it. Good excuse to try something else instead. What's everyone's favorite for semi-idiot-proof one click style rails app deployments these days?
- pgm8705 5y ago
  I use Dokku for all my toy or side projects. Super easy to set up on a Digital Ocean droplet, and depending on the size of your droplet and the memory footprint of your app, you can deploy and run many apps on the same server.
abadger9 5y ago
I deployed a personal app to Heroku when i was quite young and Heroku was barely a company. I lost access to the email that was tied to that heroku account, to their credit, the app is still deployed (and quite embarrassing to look back on). I've tried contacting support to remove the app multiple times but they've refused citing "security" concerns.
devoutsalsa 5y ago
I like Heroku, haven’t used it much lately. Out of curiosity, does Cloudflare offer enough functionality to cover one’s computer, database, and file storage needs? I know they’ve been expanding their offerings, but I don’t know if they offer enough to host a full blown web app.
sudhirj 5y ago
My biggest beef with them is that they’re so feature frozen that they threw a billion person country off rather than update billing. India recently passed a credit card tokenisation law that needs changes in an invoicing system, and Heroku sent me an email saying my 10 paid production apps would all just be shutdown because they’d rather just drop support for Indian customers. I happened to be working at Fly.io at the time, so had a clear alternative, but the way Heroku handled this really sucks.
- aerovistae 5y ago
  Well, if it was going to be a large, time-consuming, costly upgrade that was only for one country - and if they had a real minimum of customers from that country - it's a fairly sensible business calculation.
  - japhyr 5y ago
    The problem is, this fits the pattern with what Heroku has been doing for years now. Whatever works and keeps working, they're happy to steer you towards. Whatever isn't working, they're just kind of hands up in the air letting things stagnate.
  - sudhirj 5y ago
    That's the kind of cost-benefit analysis that's lazy on Heroku's part though, and doesn't properly track brand damage or even attempt to think about second order effects. The country has a huge developer population, massive internet penetration among the entire economic range and fast moving fintech scene. This is the kind of cost benefit that signals an inability to change or adapt rather than a projection of the real benefits. Stripe handled it transparently, as did many other payment gateways — the changes were somewhat in the vein of European 3DS / SCA changes anyway, and it's quite possible that the EU will adopt similar measures — not to mention that adding flexible invoice payment options allows customers to use many more international payment methods. The sad thing is instead of seeing the benefits the change would unlock it looks like Heroku focussed on the cost of doing it and gave up.
- yunohn 5y ago
didip 5y ago
Is Heroku still relevant in the public cloud market? Their price point and compute power looks very uncompetitive.
zapinek2 5y ago
Have you tried codenow.com? That's a piece to checkout, they got free cluster trial, basically automates everything
rsanheim 5y ago
Sad to see Heroku falling by the wayside. It was truly revolutionary when it came out, and I have yet to see anything that makes it so dead simple to spin up a side project or just a 'live mockup'. It still works great for my team for review apps on every pull request, which is great for live testing and avoiding contention around a staging server.
- quartz 5y ago
  Vercel kind of feels like Heroku's spiritual successor.
- sergiotapia 5y ago
  render.com is the successor to Heroku I feel. Really simple to use and get started but with realistic use cases and pricing baked in.
jaequery 5y ago
Their pricing is what turns me off most. Just to run an instance with 1gb of memory is like $50/month. Anything over than that next pricing was like $250/month, no thanks, I’ll manage my own instances.
Marchooch 5y ago
Heroku isn’t running single tenant resources and has an abstraction as a PaaS that’s in between the cloud provider entirely. MedStack Control runs independently of the clusters it provisions directly upon Azure, and are all single tenant, so outages to MedStack don’t disrupt cluster availability; only management.

110 points by pankajtanwar 5y ago

I used to be on heroku but to be honest it’s extremely expensive for what it provides. Same value for money I moved to digital ocean app platform and I am very happy with the service.

ecedeno 5y ago
One thing to worry about with DO App Platform is egress costs. They charge more than AWS!!
- aosaigh 5y ago
  Can you elaborate? Is that on files served from the App Platform CDN itself or files that are hosted on Digital Ocean Spaces? I'm trying out App Platform for a few projects at the moment
  - ecedeno 5y ago
    I don´t think it applies to content served from the App Platform CDN (Cloudflare), but egress from origin is 10¢/GB after the included bandwidth is exceeded. Excess egress from Spaces or Droplets is much cheaper at 1¢/GB, and they are more generous with the included amount.

agd 5y ago

I was just hit by this - can't deploy, can't sign in, and can't access logs via cli tool. Fingers crossed everything is fixed soon.

rrjjww 5y ago

Hmm. I got an email yesterday saying my Heroku database was automatically upgrading, something I’ve never seen before. Maybe related?

grombear 5y ago
Those are pretty common. Definitely unrelated
nomilk 5y ago
Did it have subject line > Maintenance is required for your database If so, they're pretty common; almost certainly not related.

henryaj 5y ago

FYI it's not really "down" - Heroku apps are still up and running. But the API (and so Dashboard and CLI) are down.

aosaigh 5y ago

Do people still recommend Heroku? I'm looking for a IAAS/PAAS for "simple" web apps and websites. At the moment I'm using Digital Ocean App Platform and am relatively happy so far, but I can see that it's pretty new and not very well documented. I use AWS extensively for other projects but it's just too complex. I'm looking for somethign that ticks most of the boxes and makes it easy to deploy apps and sites without total server oversight.

jelling 5y ago
Yes. Pipelines is the new killer feature; super easy dev ops with review apps.
colinramsay 5y ago
I really like it, but I'm only using it for fairly low traffic apps. I've heard it gets expensive quickly.
BoorishBears 5y ago
I had to leave DO's App Platform because either SSE or WS just wouldn't work (It's been a while but leaning towards it being SSE) After a minute or so connections would get terminated.
- pgm8705 5y ago
  Odd. We've been using DO App Platform with Web Sockets in production for over a year and haven't had any issues.
  - BoorishBears 5y ago
    Nothing odd, I said I was leaning towards SSE
nomilk 5y ago
I begrudgingly^ recommend them. ^ begrudgingly because they nearly deleted a linearly-growing production database with a week's notice and without any forewarning or revocation of INSERTs (as their docs say should happen): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30080563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30080563 Aside from that scare, and their support being about a 6/10 (which isn't too bad, all things considered), then I'd say it's pretty damn good, it certainly abstracts away a lot of complexity.

yesdocs 5y ago

Heroku is crap. You can’t deploy without dropping requests, it’s tools are lame and any serious monitoring costs you big $. ‘It just works’ is a layman’s response to the fact that it really doesn’t.

agd 5y ago
For starting new projects it does 'just work'. Super simple to set up and maintain. Yes, it might not work as well when you start to get more traffic, but for getting setup I have no complaints (aside from this downtime!).
pythonaut_16 5y ago
I wouldn't call it crap. It certainly has limitations, but for many projects those are an acceptable tradeoff for lower friction. For many projects those limitations cost less than not launching the project at all. Heroku definitely has a ton more competition these days though. Containerization has really encroached on their main value proposition. Fly.io, AWS ECS and Fargate, Managed Kubernetes, even just Docker on a VPS mostly don't require much more effort than Heroku.
nomilk 5y ago
I'd be interested to hear recommendations on what a heroku user should try instead? (particularly for rails/postgres stack, but in general also).
- dtech 5y ago
  Netlify or Amplify if you want simpler. Managed k8s (e.g. AWS EKS + Postgres RDS) will quite soon be worth it if you need more power than Heroku.
  - mikepurvis 5y ago
    What are some of the limitations of managed k8s? For a lot of scenarios, it really seems like it could be an ideal set of tradeoffs in terms of who manages what and being able to still maintain some shred of platform agnosticism.

CPLX 5y ago

Good thread timing. I was literally just about to deploy a toy proof of concept rails app this afternoon and start having some people on my team play with it. Good excuse to try something else instead. What's everyone's favorite for semi-idiot-proof one click style rails app deployments these days?

pgm8705 5y ago
I use Dokku for all my toy or side projects. Super easy to set up on a Digital Ocean droplet, and depending on the size of your droplet and the memory footprint of your app, you can deploy and run many apps on the same server.

abadger9 5y ago

I deployed a personal app to Heroku when i was quite young and Heroku was barely a company. I lost access to the email that was tied to that heroku account, to their credit, the app is still deployed (and quite embarrassing to look back on). I've tried contacting support to remove the app multiple times but they've refused citing "security" concerns.

devoutsalsa 5y ago

I like Heroku, haven’t used it much lately. Out of curiosity, does Cloudflare offer enough functionality to cover one’s computer, database, and file storage needs? I know they’ve been expanding their offerings, but I don’t know if they offer enough to host a full blown web app.

sudhirj 5y ago

My biggest beef with them is that they’re so feature frozen that they threw a billion person country off rather than update billing. India recently passed a credit card tokenisation law that needs changes in an invoicing system, and Heroku sent me an email saying my 10 paid production apps would all just be shutdown because they’d rather just drop support for Indian customers. I happened to be working at Fly.io at the time, so had a clear alternative, but the way Heroku handled this really sucks.

aerovistae 5y ago
Well, if it was going to be a large, time-consuming, costly upgrade that was only for one country - and if they had a real minimum of customers from that country - it's a fairly sensible business calculation.
- japhyr 5y ago
  The problem is, this fits the pattern with what Heroku has been doing for years now. Whatever works and keeps working, they're happy to steer you towards. Whatever isn't working, they're just kind of hands up in the air letting things stagnate.
- sudhirj 5y ago
  That's the kind of cost-benefit analysis that's lazy on Heroku's part though, and doesn't properly track brand damage or even attempt to think about second order effects. The country has a huge developer population, massive internet penetration among the entire economic range and fast moving fintech scene. This is the kind of cost benefit that signals an inability to change or adapt rather than a projection of the real benefits. Stripe handled it transparently, as did many other payment gateways — the changes were somewhat in the vein of European 3DS / SCA changes anyway, and it's quite possible that the EU will adopt similar measures — not to mention that adding flexible invoice payment options allows customers to use many more international payment methods. The sad thing is instead of seeing the benefits the change would unlock it looks like Heroku focussed on the cost of doing it and gave up.
yunohn 5y ago

didip 5y ago

Is Heroku still relevant in the public cloud market? Their price point and compute power looks very uncompetitive.

zapinek2 5y ago

Have you tried codenow.com? That's a piece to checkout, they got free cluster trial, basically automates everything

rsanheim 5y ago

Sad to see Heroku falling by the wayside. It was truly revolutionary when it came out, and I have yet to see anything that makes it so dead simple to spin up a side project or just a 'live mockup'. It still works great for my team for review apps on every pull request, which is great for live testing and avoiding contention around a staging server.

quartz 5y ago
Vercel kind of feels like Heroku's spiritual successor.
sergiotapia 5y ago
render.com is the successor to Heroku I feel. Really simple to use and get started but with realistic use cases and pricing baked in.

jaequery 5y ago

Their pricing is what turns me off most. Just to run an instance with 1gb of memory is like $50/month. Anything over than that next pricing was like $250/month, no thanks, I’ll manage my own instances.

Marchooch 5y ago

Heroku isn’t running single tenant resources and has an abstraction as a PaaS that’s in between the cloud provider entirely. MedStack Control runs independently of the clusters it provisions directly upon Azure, and are all single tenant, so outages to MedStack don’t disrupt cluster availability; only management.