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I'm hosting a few sites on Render and have been pretty happy with them so far. Getting a Rails site up and running on them isn't quite as turnkey as what Herok

I'm hosting a few sites on Render and have been pretty happy with them so far. Getting a Rails site up and running on them isn't quite as turnkey as what Heroku offers, but it still only took me a few hours to migrate one site composed of a Rails app server, Sidekiq+Redis job processor, and PG database, and that included puzzling through some lesser-explained parts of their documentation. I really appreciate the fact that their prices scale mostly linearly, as opposed to Heroku's utterly indefensible pricing practices. Render is still a fairly new company, which explains many of the feature gaps and lightness of their documentation, but I think they're well worth considering as a Heroku replacement. I have no regrets about making the switch.

andrei_says_ 5y ago
Heroku offers seamless integration with a bunch of services with free tiers, like logging, error monitoring etc. Many of these services no longer offer free tiers apart from their heroku-specific integrations. For tiny startup this makes a difference. Does Render offer anything like this?
- aaronbrethorst 5y ago
  I use Rollbar for error monitoring and they still have a free tier even when divorced from Heroku. So does Papertrail. I use Amazon SES for mail-sending because I have issues with all of the Heroku free tier products. I think I might pay a dollar or two for this each month. Render offers a managed Redis product with a free tier. I haven't had need for anything else, so ymmv.
  - andrei_says_ 5y ago
    These pretty much cover it for me, too. Thank you.
- berkes 5y ago
  I try to keep such coupling to a minimum, though. Only when the alternative to a `heroku add ..` is really hard, I prefer to have a much more flexible SOME_SAAS_KEY env var and use that in my app/adapters rather than having heroku shoehorn it in. Because the latter only ever ties me further into Heroku. Which, following YAGNI, may not be an issue today, but does make your agility and ability to react to market changes (such as alternatives being a better option) much less. I try to keep my software platform agnostic because any tight coupling will haunt me in future.

andrei_says_ 5y ago

Heroku offers seamless integration with a bunch of services with free tiers, like logging, error monitoring etc. Many of these services no longer offer free tiers apart from their heroku-specific integrations. For tiny startup this makes a difference. Does Render offer anything like this?

aaronbrethorst 5y ago
I use Rollbar for error monitoring and they still have a free tier even when divorced from Heroku. So does Papertrail. I use Amazon SES for mail-sending because I have issues with all of the Heroku free tier products. I think I might pay a dollar or two for this each month. Render offers a managed Redis product with a free tier. I haven't had need for anything else, so ymmv.
- andrei_says_ 5y ago
  These pretty much cover it for me, too. Thank you.
berkes 5y ago
I try to keep such coupling to a minimum, though. Only when the alternative to a `heroku add ..` is really hard, I prefer to have a much more flexible SOME_SAAS_KEY env var and use that in my app/adapters rather than having heroku shoehorn it in. Because the latter only ever ties me further into Heroku. Which, following YAGNI, may not be an issue today, but does make your agility and ability to react to market changes (such as alternatives being a better option) much less. I try to keep my software platform agnostic because any tight coupling will haunt me in future.