20 ms·

Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go?

• toovs 4y ago
  I've been using render.com
• plopper823 4y ago
  Moved from Heroku to Scalingo 1) Took a few hours to have everything setup. Transition was easy 2) Not that much. I chose heroku because i hate doing sys admin stuff 3) Can't say for this one, scalingo is a PAAS 4) Scalingo will probably be more expensive for starter plans but as you grow it won't be like heroku's horrible pricing 5) Mostly app with no traffic to be honest
  • kemenaran 4y ago
    I used Scalingo for Rails apps a while ago, and was quite impressed by the quality of the platform. Very Heroku-like. Maybe not as polished, but still doing the PaaS job pretty well (git push, and you're done).
  • jeppester 4y ago
    Thank you for this! We've been looking for an EU based heroku alternative for a while. Thanks to a couple of people suggesting scalingo here on HN, I gave it a try last night and I'm very impressed with the offering. It took me less than an hour to get our rails template running - with no code changes at all. The prices are comparable or lower than heroku, and unlike heroku your not forced into paying much more when your memory usage starts exceeding 512 mb.
• Velc 4y ago
  Railway.app No affiliation, I’m actually preferring the experience. Heroku is showing its age now.
• langsoul-com 4y ago
  I was looking into that, but there's no other super easy heroku like platform. Something where I could just push code and it'd deal with the build packs. Most of them require Docker. I heard keyob is decent, otherwise fly.io. Render and railways.app have inactive or day limited services.
• peteforde 4y ago
  fly.io is a big deal. It's not as easy as Heroku as there's no managed Postgres, but it's well-documented with a few paths. However, the main reason Fly stands out is their focus on multi-region deployments. Ever wondered why facebook.com is fast no matter where you are? Fly provides app-level tooling to make this superpower available to everyone. It's especially important if you're making heavy use of Web Sockets. Everyone wants to be the new Heroku, but that should be table stakes. Fly is innovative in the same way Heroku was when it launched.
  • kodah 4y ago
    > Ever wondered why facebook.com is fast no matter where you are? They provide app-level tooling to make this superpower available to everyone. They're doing that in the app? GeoDNS has been around for quite some time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoDNS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoDNS or more thoroughly explained: https://jameshfisher.com/2017/02/08/how-does-geodns-work/ https://jameshfisher.com/2017/02/08/how-does-geodns-work/
    • peteforde 4y ago
      Fly's multi-region capability is BGP Anycast-based, which is vastly superior (and much more complex to deploy, outside of Fly) to DNS-based solutions like GeoDNS. One example of app-level tooling is the fly-replay header, which permits your app to automatically replay requests in different regions. This works really well alongside the FLY-REGION environment variable that is available to each node. https://fly.io/docs/reference/fly-replay/ https://fly.io/docs/reference/fly-replay/ Another example of app-level tooling is the availability of NATS Jetstream, a key/value store that is less feature-rich than Redis, but supports multi-region active/active replication. This is a big deal, as Redis doesn't offer it at the free tier, and many others (KeyDB) who advertise it seem to have trouble delivering it when there's more than two regions in play.
      • lyime 4y ago
        Would have been a good comment if you dropped the first line.
• tatoalo 4y ago
  I've tried both render and fly.io, finally settled with fly. Love the DX!
• sgloutnikov 4y ago
  I moved my small free Python/Django app to Fly.io and am extremely happy. The move was seamless because they allow you to run your app from a Dockerfile which was straight forward after going through the documentation. Looking forward to building more things on Fly.io.
  • mgreenleaf 4y ago
    Highly recommend fly.io as well; I started an elixir app for a client and decided to use fly.io and very impressed with how easy it is with the feature set so far.
  • tomwojcik 4y ago
    I'm planning the migration with my Django side projects from heroku to fly as well. Fly has a special org on GH with example projects, but the one with Django is empty. I created a small test repo to see how Fly works. hands on. Thought I'd share. https://github.com/tomwojcik/django-fly.io-example-project https://github.com/tomwojcik/django-fly.io-example-project
  • davidguetta 4y ago
    Price ?
• sergioisidoro 4y ago
  I moved to CapRover, and shortly after ended up moving to Portainer, mostly because CapRover does not have very good collaborative environment (eg. A single password for access) With 20Eur a month and a VPS on Digital Ocean you can get quite far. I also made a small project to spin up a PaaS like environment with docker swarm, Portainer and Traefik if you're interested: https://github.com/sergioisidoro/honey-swarm https://github.com/sergioisidoro/honey-swarm
  • jacooper 4y ago
    If you want better bank for the buck VPS, checkout Hetzner. Or oracle's free tier.
    • sergioisidoro 4y ago
      I had a very bad experience with billing and Hetzner. My card failed on a personal project without me realising it. When I noticed it was already too late and they had wiped out all my servers and all my data. Yes Hetzner is cheap, but I'm scarred from that event.
  • nwienert 4y ago
    Sweet, this is my exact setup which I love for the simplicity to power ratio. Will check it out.
• pftg 4y ago
  I found great advice on Twitter https://twitter.com/pauld_fgc/status/1574107791651905536 https://twitter.com/pauld_fgc/status/1574107791651905536 by Paul P. API & Platform Results: Rails: @Railway wins. Render wakeup boot extremely slow (~1m). Flyio cannot run Rails for free. Crystal: @Render wins. 5-10s wakeup boot time. Railway & Fly keep growing memory infinitely. Node: @flydotio + Railway both win. Very slow boot on Render.
  • o_m 4y ago
    These are free plans though? Not a good comparison if you are a professional looking at this.
  • compumike 4y ago
    For Crystal, I wrote the IdleGC shard https://github.com/compumike/idle-gc https://github.com/compumike/idle-gc to combat slow memory growth. Runs garbage collection when not servicing requests. Running in production on https://totalrealreturns.com/ https://totalrealreturns.com/
• gw67 4y ago
  Digital Ocean + CLoud66
• baptistejamin 4y ago
  We are really recommending https://www.clever-cloud.com/ https://www.clever-cloud.com/ . Their stack is awesome, great uptime and great support.
  • selcuka 4y ago
    Are you planning to make a disclosure regarding that statement, such as being co-founders with Quentin Adam, the founder of Clever Cloud, in other projects?
    • solarkraft 4y ago
      Ouch! Stuff like this should always be disclosed. Something like "My co-founder / friend built ..." would be totally fine, but this comment looks like it intentionally obscures the connection. Not a good look.
      • pglombardo 4y ago
        I don't find it a big deal. Smart people will evaluate the offering for themselves and not make a decision based on a 1 line comment on Hacker News. Plus, I doubt they would spend their lives building the project and not recommend it.
    • waxzce 4y ago
      Other project meaning being contributor to open source together?
      • selcuka 4y ago
        > Other project meaning being contributor to open source together? Other project meaning actually founding that project together [1]: > The Makers for Life collective and project were founded by three entrepreneurs in Nantes. Quentin Adam (CEO Clever Cloud), Baptiste Jamin and Valérian Saliou (Co-founders Crisp) [...] You live in the same city. You founded a project with him. It's not like you have submitted patches to Linux from different parts of the world, without ever seeing each other. I don't want to sound like I have something personal (I didn't even know your names until yesterday) but your assumption that the readers here on HN have no clue makes me sick. If you know each other, that should be disclosed. I have no qualms about recommending a friend's startup, given that the friendship is disclosed. [1] https://makair.life/2020/05/01/makers-for-life-the-making-of-a-collective/ https://makair.life/2020/05/01/makers-for-life-the-making-of...
• mkl95 4y ago
  We have been using "Amazon Web Services". They should market their services more, they definitely have a bright future...
  • hnzix 4y ago
    AWS is IaaS not PaaS. With IaaS you need to hire competent infra admins. PaaS abstracts away much of that requirement.
    • yowmamasita 4y ago
      https://aws.amazon.com/apprunner/ https://aws.amazon.com/apprunner/ https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/ https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/ https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/ https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/ https://aws.amazon.com/appsync/ https://aws.amazon.com/appsync/ https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/ https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/
      • ignoramous 4y ago
        AppRunner is great while being cheaper than Fargate, but it is not cheaper than its NewCloud counterparts like fly.io and render.com. Not sure if railway.app is, 'cause I never could wrap my head around their pricing model. Lightsail Containers are a credible alternative, too. Whereas, Lambda / Lambda@Edge / CloudFront Functions are of course wayyyyy more expensive (even if more capable) than workers.dev.
      • dublin 4y ago
        BTW, EB (Elastic Beanstalk) is generally viewed as just for those getting started, but I've seen companies build really serious stuff (and at significant scale) on it, including an extremely high performance distributed IoT time series database (that was 10 years ago, back before there were good time series DBs to just use). AWS doesn't push EB much, partly because it does offer great value and doesn't make them nearly as much money as things like FarGate or AppSync. If you need something that just does what really needs doing cheaply and well, though, give it another look.
  • 4y ago
• 7speter 4y ago
  I’m building apps for a portfolio. I’ve dabbled with heroku before and was always skeptical of their motivation, a convenient hosting solution to latch you in (when you can learn how to host on your own for low cost and high roi in regards of time and knowledge). I have a linode vps with a wordpress blog up but I want to learn docker and host my apps on there for 5 dollars a month.
• timmit 4y ago
  I write an article on Dev.to about the self host alternative for Heroku/PaaS. Basically these three - caprover - dokku - k8s https://dev.to/timhub/self-host-heroku-alternative-40l4 https://dev.to/timhub/self-host-heroku-alternative-40l4
  • jacooper 4y ago
    The way to go is either caprover or pure docker - compose (deployed from a git repo) on Oracle free tier.
• evolve2k 4y ago
  I went with render.com (no affiliation). Found them fairly easy to use, really excellent support.
  • Khamsin 4y ago
    Same here, Pretty much the exact same features, for a fraction of the price. Stability/Availability has been perfect since we moved.
  • shafyy 4y ago
    Same here, also moved to Render and love their UX, UI and docs. Good customer support too (needed it to add VAT ID for my business, so nothing technical).
  • jamil7 4y ago
    Every time I've tried to give render.com a proper go, I've run into some weird small issue. Ended up settling on fly.io and use that for everything now.
    • eropple 4y ago
      (Render hat on) Interesting feedback--feel like sharing in detail? You can reach me directly at ed@render.com.
      • jamil7 4y ago
        Hey! Thanks for that, I'll find out what the most recent issue I ran into was and shoot you an email. In general I like the idea and direction, seems like a much closer Heroku successor.
  • hrdwdmrbl 4y ago
    I'll chime in and say that I did the same. A lot of people like Fly but I wanted super low complexity. My hope has mostly panned out. I was able to move without too much difficulty and I'm happy with how it turned out.
• cantrememberit 4y ago
  One of the best alternatives I found is using dokku with a cheap VPS. Dokku even has herokuish buildpacks and supports (automated) deployment of docker images etc. On top of that dokku is open source with a very helpful community, total cost: 0$. Not looking back at all. https://dokku.com/ https://dokku.com/
  • satvikpendem 4y ago
    I tried Dokku out but I didn't like the lack of GUI, I wrote in another comment but I've been using Coolify (https://coolify.io https://coolify.io) as a great alternative with a built in GUI, also free and open source.
    • boxed 4y ago
      There is dokku pro if you want a GUI. Personally I bought a copy but never used it. I don't really want a GUI :P
      • satvikpendem 4y ago
        That's true, I used to use Dokku a while ago but after some time I just wanted to take it easy and click buttons haha
• satvikpendem 4y ago
  I am using Coolify (https://coolify.io https://coolify.io), an open source self-hosted PaaS which is a relatively newer kid on the block compared to Dokku and CapRover. I tried both of these and I just didn't like how they were, always had some problem or another. In contrast, Coolify has a great GUI that abstracts away the most common things about PaaS hosting, like connecting to GitHub automatically for git push deploys, SSL certificates, reverse proxying and custom domain support, and best of all, having support for Heroku style buildpacks as well as Dockerfiles. I've been quite happy with it, the creator has a Discord and responds to issues very quickly. With regards to non-self-hosted options, I did try out Render, Fly.io and Railway but I found that their free servers were too anemic. I was compiling a Rust backend and it simply could not compile on their free servers. On Hetzner, for 5 bucks I could get a 2 AMD vCPU and 2 GB RAM machine that was sufficient to compile my Rust apps in a way that the non-self-hosted ones were not. I have a JS frontend app that works fine though but I wanted to keep everything under the same VPS, plus I can run other types of self-hosted services on it too, like Plausible analytics and a Ghost blog. I'm not sure if those are allowed on non-self-hosted options. All in all, it costs me 5 bucks a month, and I never have to worry about sudden upcharges for traffic à la AWS as in the very worst, my VPS goes down for a while. I'm now running about 20 different services on this 5 dollar box including databases and applications as well as other services, works just fine.
  • zapt02 4y ago
    It's funny how people are different, after using CapRover for years I tried Coolify but it felt like so much functionality was missing that I would not use it over CapRover in its current state. All the things you mentioned (GitHub webhooks, custom domains, SSL certs, reverse proxying) are supported by Cap. It also supports Docker Swarm.
    • satvikpendem 4y ago
      When I looked at CapRover recently, the GitHub integration in the docs required manually setting up a GitHub Actions integration and I couldn't exactly figure out what parts I needed to change since the example was for a NodeJS app, and I'm assuming it needed to be added or changed for each repo you want to track git pushes from. In contrast, with Coolify, you simply login with your GitHub account and it installs a (one-time setup) GitHub app onto your account that automatically sets up the webhooks and I didn't need to do any configuration after that, it just worked for all subsequent apps. That level of ease of use is the experience I had with Heroku and I do not understand why more self-hosted PaaS don't seem to replicate that as well. Also I like the Coolify GUI over the CapRover one, dark mode plus modern non-Bootstrap design is nice.
• mardix 4y ago
  For another self hosted alternative, which can be hosted on Digital Ocean, Linode, Hetzner, check out Sailor[1]. Sailor[1] is a tiny PaaS to install on your servers/VPS that uses git push to deploy micro-apps, micro-services, sites with SSL, on your own servers or VPS [1] https://github.com/mardix/sailor https://github.com/mardix/sailor.
• aerovistae 4y ago
  So glad to see this thread, reading everything! Question I've been wondering for months and unsuccessfully seeking out people with experience on the topic - I'm going to be launch a socket.io app on heroku soon, a multiplayer card game, and I have _no idea_ what kind of hosting costs to expect in terms of dyno usage. Has anyone done something similar?
• SonicSnowball 4y ago
  I've been using Render.com, but I experience very slow boot time with my Node application. I think I will be moving my project to Fly.io
• hpeinar 4y ago
  I wrote about it shortly here in another Heroku topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32585299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32585299 But to answer your questions: 1. It took around 1-2 months of experienced DevOps works (1-2 devops), this included testing and the actual switchover to new AWS infra. 2. We actually used outside contractors (actual k8s gurus) to do the work. But the decision was made in-house by myself. I'm no k8s guru, hell, I'm not even devops, but I have enough experience with the "big guys" so the choice was calculated from technical perspective, considering our growth needs and technical needs for now and for the future. 3. I haven't had any reasons to regret the decision, but I knew that before. I knew AWS offered the things we need and how to use them and what it's roughly going to cost, so this wasn't really a surprise. I did my due diligence. 4. Heroku bills were around 5$k/mon... AWS ones are in 5 digit, but it was expected because we started to use so much more services and resources than we did (or could) in Heroku. We also expanded into two new countries (one of the main reasons the switchover was done) so the costs are sadly not directly comparable. I can say that the new costs are in expected ranges and I'm happy with what we get for the money. 5. We run a eCommerce site with monthly GMV of 1m€+ and around 700k monthly unique visitors. Our stack is (per country) 3 nodejs services, PostgreSQL, redis and some frontend services. Main cost factors are the database(s) and CloudFront. 6. These decision have to made per use-case, per project and taking into consideration your actual infrastructure needs and budget limits. I don't think there isn't anything AWS can't do, but is the cheapest? Of course not. Hell, there have been plenty of topics on this very page about moving your infrastructure to your own bare metal and saving hundreds of thousands per month. Think through what are the issues you are currently having (ie, for us it was the Herokus stack limitations, couldn't get http2, couldn't do custom monitoring / alerting, no access to LBs, no scalable DB hosting, the need to easily roll out new countries without having to do too much of manual work, weirdly high cost of some services, like redis for an example). If your problems are in the wallet, you need to consider this as your first priority and find a provider which will meet your technical needs with best price. All the big guys also have cost calculators available which will allow you to get an estimation on what you would be paying. Take time, this isn't an easy decision and it will affect you a lot in the future as well, so you don't want to get it wrong to be stuck with another set of issues.
• hankchinaski 4y ago
  DigitalOcean. Databases are much cheaper. No big deal in moving as digital ocean app platform supports buildpacks
  • BigglesZX 4y ago
    I've been waiting to make this same move but holding back because DOAP isn't quite as featureful yet, e.g. not supporting scheduled jobs, which for some reason ALL my Heroku-based projects use in some way.
    • hankchinaski 4y ago
      For scheduled jobs right now is a pita I expose HTTP endpoints which I call from an outside service on a scheduled basis
  • nicoburns 4y ago
    How have you found reliability/uptime on DO?
    • hankchinaski 4y ago
      An order of magnitude better than heroku
  • pglombardo 4y ago
    I'm considering the same for https://pwpush.com https://pwpush.com. Currently on paid Heroku ($59/month) with a lot of traffic. DO App Platform is better than last year but still a bit quirky. I haven't found a better alternative that is more 1) mature, 2) reliable, 3) paid/supported, 4) enough features.
    • nomilk 4y ago
      After clicking the link to pwpush.com I had a recollection of the splash page.. Seems we've met before! https://gist.github.com/stevecondylios/16a53b73f22621e3cde2e17096dbf5ca?permalink_comment_id=3912839#gistcomment-3912839 https://gist.github.com/stevecondylios/16a53b73f22621e3cde2e... Awesome to hear Password Pusher is going very well :)
• ashishb 4y ago
  Google cloud run https://ashishb.net/tech/how-to-deploy-side-projects-as-web-services-for-free/ https://ashishb.net/tech/how-to-deploy-side-projects-as-web-...
• charlieegan3 4y ago
  I have moved a Rails and Go app to https://northflank.com https://northflank.com. I have my Rails app running in their free project (limited to two services and 2 jobs) and my Go app in a paid project. I find the pricing to be very reasonable and considerably cheaper than Heroku. I was looking for somewhere I could run web services and cron jobs both in the same place. They have a Heroku importer, however I think you need to ask to have it turned on. I found that it was easier for me to build docker images for my apps and use a 'build service' instead however. YMMV I found their support to be very responsive and enjoy using their UI. The UI, builds and so on all feel very fast. Northflank can run databases, however for my databases I've been running them on ElephantSQL for some time (https://www.elephantsql.com https://www.elephantsql.com) - even when I was on Heroku. Free for Dev's PaaS list is worth a review: https://free-for.dev/#/?id=paas https://free-for.dev/#/?id=paas
  • proton_9 4y ago
    thanks for this mate, was looking for a free tier paas to show off some proof of concept projects, northflank seems good.
    • charlieegan3 4y ago
      Certainly the best option I've found for my needs. Good luck :)
  • dizhn 4y ago
    Do you see a way to delete your account in your account settings? Their privacy policy says it should be there but I can't find it. I actually don't see a way to delete a project once created either.
    • decidertm 4y ago
      Northflank co-founder here. You can delete your project navigating to the billing page inside a project. To delete your account you can send a support request and we can process your request (described in the privacy policy). We'd like to automate it more, however we'd like a formal opt-in via email of the account/team owner when deleting backups and stateful workloads right now.
• stwsh 4y ago
  I had a comment system (staticman) on heroku, I moved to fly.io and the import (build by fly.io) was done in some minutes, adjusting my blog and ready to go. All in all 15 min.
  • ryantgtg 4y ago
    Oh good call. I was trying to figure out what to do with my two staticman apps that I have on heroku. And I wanted to try fly.io! Edit: though I don't want to pay for staticman stuff. Are you running them for free?
    • ryantgtg 4y ago
      Update: I moved mine to fly.io using the heroku migrater. Took 5 mins.
• movedx 4y ago
  (I'm assuming the OP is referring to production workloads.) I think PaaS is awesome. I actually consider moving to one of the managed offerings from time to time... then I look at the pricing. As a systems engineer specialising in automation, it's hard for me to justify the $75-100/month fee from a PaaS provider (not including network bandwidth), when I currently pay that now for the same thing in AWS including network bandwidth (and I haven't even optimised it with CloudFront yet and static asset deployments to S3.) I'm not saying PaaS should be a foregone conclusion based purely on my microscopic example and edge case, but if you can configure a CI/CD pipeline (I recommend GitLab CI or GitHub Actions), manage/configure an OS (I recommend Ansible), write Terraform to build out your infrastructure (loads and loads and loads of TF code libraries with example code you can just run with), and a few extra steps, then I'd recommend going IaaS. You can keep the entire thing KISS, you'll know it inside out, you can grow it (or not) to any scale whilst keeping costs considerably lower than any managed PaaS available, you can hire someone else down the line to look after it when you've reached that level of scale/success/financial freedom, and more. That being said, I can certainly see a huge value add in doing both: IaaS with a self-managed PaaS stack on top of it. That is, I think, the sweet spot. Note: yep, maintaining your own infra' is undesirable to a lot of people. If you're one of those people, then stick to managed PaaS and pay the price (it's worth it in your case.) Note: yep, your time does (technically) have a cost associated with it, but if you're building solutions based on IaaS everyday of your life, you've likely done a lot of the work already.
  • salmo 4y ago
    This is odd to me as well. The value of PaaS scales with developers. But Heroku et al target small shops. If you have 100 dev teams, infra experience is a lot of “overhead.” If you have 5, you just make sure some of the devs know how to strace and tcpdump and can collab in an incident. Frankly, building infrastructure is easy. Maintaining it is the hard part. Preventative maintenance, security, recovering from incidents are all much harder than figuring out enough for it to run. It was a brilliant idea. Let devs be devs. But the price has always been so high that, at scale, it wasn’t far off the HR cost. We’ve gone 180 on that with k8s. Now you have to understand a datacenter with different vocabulary to effectively leverage it. You see low adoption at “I have an app” because it’s more complicated than it’s worth. Higher adoption above that. But almost 0 adoption at I need 100+ clusters. And 90% of what I see assumes to exist in a single cluster as if etcd never hangs itself. We’ve built all of these abstractions, but ultimately you have to understand the thing below them (ie Linux and VMs) when performance sucks or something goes boom. I don’t know how someone walks in and learns it all at once vs my life of learning with the growing system from Unix on physicals to now. It’s like my life with Java. Most devs don’t understand where to start troubleshooting performance or the JVM, despite rich tooling (magical APM, JFRs, etc).
• kuon 4y ago
  I took static ips on my fiber and I use my older workstation as a server. I use zfs for backup of the whole thing. It is not mission critical so I can accept downtime. Even then, in the last year I had zero downtime. I think it can be a viable (and fun) option for many small applications.
• pplonski86 4y ago
  I'm working on an open-source framework for converting Jupyter Notebook to interactive web applications. I was using free Heroku dynos for demo app deployments. I have 19 demo applications running (example https://automated-pdf-reports.herokuapp.com/ https://automated-pdf-reports.herokuapp.com/) All apps use 1000 free dyno hours in ~25 days, so at the end of the month, Heroku switched them off. I didn't find any free alternative for my users and me. I'm thinking about building my own service where users can upload notebooks and publish them as web applications.
• amitchau 4y ago
  [dead]
• heeton 4y ago
  I have 4 apps running on fly.io for most of this year and can recommend them. 2 are elixir apps that have been created on fly, 1 was an elixir app I had running on heroku, and 1 was rails app on heroku I recently migrated. I used their heroku migrator and it worked pretty much automatically. I had a few steps to follow to move the DB, but their docs covered it - https://fly.io/docs/rails/getting-started/migrate-from-heroku/ https://fly.io/docs/rails/getting-started/migrate-from-herok... I didn't want a self-hosted flavor of Heroku, and I value an opinionated and active community around the platform. I'll mirror another comment here: > Everyone wants to be the new Heroku, but that should be table stakes. Fly is innovative in the same way Heroku was when it launched.
  • davidguetta 4y ago
    Price ?
    • flakiness 4y ago
      Relatively cheap with some free tier? https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/ https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/ One good thing is there is no DB-specific premium. It seems their PG is just an "app" on the platform and storage is priced accordingly.
    • ceejayoz 4y ago
      I get an email each month forgiving my bill because it’s under $5. Got three small VMs running.
  • Joe8Bit 4y ago
    I can second fly.io, I moved a bunch of personal (but "production") projects from Heroku to it recently (Node, Rust, Rails) and the experience has been great. I can also second their Heroku migrator, worked pretty flawlessly. Overall, my pricing has been about the same or 5-10% less per month. It doesn't have the same "Click this button to add this third-party service to your dynos, with billing included" eco-system that Heroku has (had?) but my Heroku usage was pretty vanilla so it wasn't an issue for me.
• andrasbacsai 4y ago
  Hey, Andras here, founder of Coolify (https://coolify.io https://coolify.io). Coolify is an open-source & self-hostable Heroku / Netlify alternative. Lots of features are added day-by-day and I'm open for new ones. Visit our Github (https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify) or our feedback page (https://feedback.coolify.io/ https://feedback.coolify.io/) to get more info. A few months ago, I quit my job and started to work on it full-time (best decision I've made). It is not VC funded (said no to 30+ investors - time will let me know if it was a good decision or not ), but funded by the awesome community! <3 Why I'm mentioning this? Because I would like to focus on the functionalities, the community & the users and not the revenue and other boring metrics. I just would like to make a good software, enjoy the process and make people's life easier. I do not want to make millions of dollars from it. If me and my family could live happily, that is totally fine. Let me know if you have an questions. I'm happy to answer them. (Also I'm working on a cloud/managed hosting version of Coolify (https://beta.coolify.io/ https://beta.coolify.io/))
  • lagrange77 4y ago
    Looks really ...cool. When you say Netlify alternative, you're referring to commit-to-deploy functionality of static files only, not a global CDN and serverless functions, right?
    • andrasbacsai 4y ago
      Yes, I mean that you can easily deploy static sites. It does not have global CDN and serverless functions (yet), but you can easily set a CDN (like bunny.net) in front of your sites and then it will be globally CDN'd. I'm using similar setup all my marketing sites. It is deployed by Coolify to a server and Bunny CDN will make it globally available. So I do not need to care about any traffic bumps (like I have at the moment) and all my commits are deployed automatically.
  • sandGorgon 4y ago
    this is very very cool! one question - u deploy to individual servers right ? can u target deploy to a kubernetes platform. Like EKS? I couldnt find it in your docs. Because one of the cool things about Heroku is scale-up. A cool project here is https://sst.dev/ https://sst.dev/. Would love to see EKS/GKE native integration there.
• asim 4y ago
  I use the m3o.com/app service (because I wrote it). It's a simple interface on top of Google Cloud Run that gives me back a *.m3o.app url. I can run it like `m3o app run --name=helloworld --repo=https://github.com/m3o/m3o-app https://github.com/m3o/m3o-app` and then go to https://helloworld.m3o.app https://helloworld.m3o.app
• xeoneux 4y ago
  I got a VPS off Contabo and started using docker compose for deployments. Learning it all took me a day (I had been using docker but compose was new) and the implementation took me one more day. Mainly setting up GH workflow for automated deploys. There's just so much freedom now! Cost wise, I am down from about $24 to $8 with a much better performance. I can finally have a server near to the users and not be restricted to just US or Europe.
  • yakorevivan 4y ago
• T3RMINATED 4y ago
• aalhafoudh 4y ago
  I am working on heroku/dokku-like CLI tool which manages and deploys apps to any Kubernetes cluster and abstracts all kubernetes concepts from you. Tool has simple commands like "config set KEY=VALUE" and so. I also plan to implement simple web UI. The tool requires minimum dependencies inside the kubernetes cluster and it tries to follow all best practices on kubernetes. Unfortunately the tool is not ready yet. Would something like this be interesting for someone else other than me?
  • speedgoose 4y ago
    Yes! I think this is the right approach. Using kubernetes is going to be much safer on the long term, because most software projects die and kubernetes isn't going to die soon. It is also much more used and probably a lot more stable.
    • aalhafoudh 4y ago
      Yes, exactly this is my point. I use kubernetes as a framework for infrastructure management which has all concepts I need. Here is the github link https://github.com/alhafoudh/eien https://github.com/alhafoudh/eien I will push what I have today.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  • robswc 4y ago
    as an avid fan of dokku, def interested! are you able to drop a link to the repo (if it exists yet)?
    • aalhafoudh 4y ago
      Repo is here. I will push it today https://github.com/alhafoudh/eien https://github.com/alhafoudh/eien
• thih9 4y ago
  Is there any context regarding moving apps off Heroku? I don’t have any apps there myself but I’ve worked on projects hosted on Heroku and I remember being happy with that provider. Did they raise prices, change their services, or something similar?
  • nomilk 4y ago
    Skimming HN over the past year shows many negatives and very few positives: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=true&query=heroku&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru... TL;DR - Security issues - Declining innovation (since being owned by Salesforce) - Changes to pricing/plans
  • perelin 4y ago
    They removed their free tier plan.
  • Havoc 4y ago
    They killed their free tier. Apparently paying customers benefited too so was perceived as a loss of value provided
  • jrochkind1 4y ago
    Generally they've been having an increasing number of embarrassing mistakes/problems/outages that they handle clunkily, and do not seem to be investing in the future of their service.
• rishabhd 4y ago
  Closed everything and now I grow potatoes.
  • stefanyas 4y ago
    Most based comment I've read this week.
• mariusio 4y ago
  I was asking myself exactly the same question today. I would especially be interested in providers that have data centers in Australia, as most of them don’t unfortunately. What can you recommend for an Heroku alternative down under?
• iddan 4y ago
  We wrote a blog post with a comparison of the prominent alternatives for Heroku: https://blog.flycode.com/7-excellent-alternatives-to-heroku https://blog.flycode.com/7-excellent-alternatives-to-heroku we compare there Render, Fly.io, Railway, Porter, Northflank, Koyeb and Qoddi.com
  • cdubzzz 4y ago
    Thanks for sharing. This introduced a few I missed back when I was evaluating alternatives. Nothing I have tried so far fits quite as well as Heroku but Porter looks like it has a chance…
• pSYoniK 4y ago
  1. Not a lot of work, probably a day to move things. 2. Almost none. I used Heroku and understood what it was doing on a very surface level. I knew I could push my repo and my project would automagically be "there", but since I was early on in my learning process, I didn't know for sure what was happening. So the migration was a great experience to understand how to setup my website, how to setup a reverse proxy, how to prepare the certificates, how to secure a linux box and many many more (it's an ongoing process!) 3. Extremely. I am now a huge supporter of IAAS in general. I think all the things I learned are valuable in general and widely applicable. I know what an lsblk does, I know what ufw allow/deny does and so on. Hell, at the most basic level I understand how to use nano to edit some config files, how to search or edit files from a terminal. I really enjoy it and I went as far as to setup my own home server. 4-5. A lot cheaper now. I had one website running and another hobby project and that was 7$ a month. I have my website now (static page with caddy as reverse proxy), pihole vps, another VPS used to do backup checks, VPN server - all these are free, except the website which runs on the cheapest Hetzner vps and I could probably run other things on it. 6. I think everyone should spend some time deploying their apps o a remote server, securing it and accessing it. Even if you never use this again, it will help you understand how to manage all of these things and get a better idea of the information flow from start to finish. Learning how to poke around a command line is also very helpful.
  • nomilk 4y ago
    > the migration was a great experience to understand how to setup my website, how to setup a reverse proxy, how to prepare the certificates, how to secure a linux box If you have any resources on the topics you had to learn, please share! > I went as far as to setup my own home server. Congrats! How long did it take you to skill up from Heroku to home server?
    • pSYoniK 4y ago
      I started with Digital Ocean (DO) and Linode's guides to get an idea of the setup in general - https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/initial-server-setup-with-ubuntu-22-04 https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/initial-ser... (you can change distros if you're wanting the guide for something else) and https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/set-up-and-secure/ https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/set-up-and-secure/ I used DO because I had gotten some free credits as a student and they were valid for a year, so it gave me time to experiment. Once I went through the guides, I started researching the topic further, each time expanding on anything I didn't know or understand. To go from Heroku to home server, I spent about a year all in all doing the research, learning what needs to be done, what hardware, what security considerations and so on. Before buying the server hardware and doing that, I setup a VM with the Linux distro I wanted to use, mimicked the storage setup and then went about doing the whole setup from start to finish and documenting things along the way. Installing, setting up users, changing login policies, adding drives, formatting them, hard drive error checking and automated notifications, setting up docker containers, docker container backups, container updates, limiting access of containers, setting up network shares, LAN sync, multimedia playback, software backups and automated server backups. Each new step would highlight a new learning opportunity and would raise new questions. It's really interesting and I went ahead and installed Pop OS (initially I used Zorin os pro) on all my devices which gave me a place to test out small scripts to automate a system reinstall/setup. My next goal is to collate all of this information and organize it into a guide that explores this setup from start to finish, but that's a few months out. After that I want to move away from a single Linux install running to a Proxmox install on my home server, a couple of VMs running my services and space set aside to allow me to start a new VM when I want to test something out. I also want to build my own router using Open BSD. Hope this helps!
• felicopter 4y ago
  Dokku. ("Docker" + "Heroku".) The migration was done before I joined but looks pretty easy.
• olieidel 4y ago
  Throwing Scalingo [1] in here because I feel they get way less exposure than they deserve. We [2] offer a SaaS for medical device companies. GDPR compliance made us look for a EU-based company, and the recent Heroku situations (disappearing free tier and GitHub OAuth fiasco) made us switch to Scalingo. Scalingo is based in France. Their PaaS is rock-solid. The UI sometimes looks less polished but that shouldn't detract from the fact that their service quality is really, really good. No problems so far. When I had questions, I've been in touch with their support - you have real engineers responding to your message in a few hours. Really cool. I've recently come to increasingly appreciate profitable, bootstrapped startups, because they have (much) less incentive of getting acquired, subsequently shifting their focus to "scale" and "enterprise sales" (wait, which company comes to mind here.. ah, Heroku). Scalingo is bootstrapped and profitable. Why not render.com or fly.io? Both are based in the US, so GDPR compliance becomes more tricky. They're VC-funded, so I have no clue what will happen to them in the future. Maybe they'll be profitable and their investors will say "oh okay, it's fine to have a boring, profitable startup in our portfolio". Maybe not. Likely not. [1] https://scalingo.com https://scalingo.com [2] https://openregulatory.com https://openregulatory.com
  • jeppester 4y ago
    Thank you for this! We've been looking for an EU based heroku alternative for a while. Thanks to a couple of people suggesting scalingo here on HN, I gave it a try last night and I'm very impressed with the offering. It took me less than an hour to get our rails template running - with no code changes at all. The prices are comparable or lower than heroku, and unlike heroku your not forced into paying much more when your memory usage starts exceeding 512 mb.
• byteofbits 4y ago
  We moved from Heroku to GCP after approximately two years of using Heroku. (This was three years ago so some information may have changed) The move worked out incredibly smoothly and has saved us money and allowed us to "modernise" our infrastructure to take advantage of some of the newer trends in Infrastructure and Security. To address your direct questions: 1. Not very long. We were running a NodeJS app with a web layer and several background workers. We were able to get this running on a Google Compute Engine VM in about 1 day using Packer. The whole migration process took about two weeks start to finish. 2. Our team is relatively experienced and had experience with all three major platforms and Kubernetes (although we chose not to use Kube in this case). We are definitely a team of developers, not sysadmins though. This means we had to learn some new things particularly about tuning NodeJS apps on raw linux. 3. I don't think we learnt too much (other than the undocumented rough edges of both platforms) but it was definitely worth it for financial and quality reasons. 4. It's a relatively hard metric to calculate when the company is growing user base and features quickly - but I would estimate it at around 50%. 5. 1 app with around 5000 requests per second. NodeJS / Typescript / Rust 6. If you have only ever used Heroku I think it would be worth getting comfortable with Containers (Docker basically) and making your app run in a container. From there you have tools like Railway (https://railway.app https://railway.app) or Cloud66 (https://www.cloud66.com https://www.cloud66.com) that can do most of the rest for you.
  • AndreasHae 4y ago
    I‘m curious about your reasons to decide against Kubernetes and instead opt for plain VMs + Packer, especially when already familiar with the platform.
• quickthrower2 4y ago
  For my next project (pun intended) I will use vercel to host and grab a postgre instance somewhere (maybe heroku or elsewhere) for the storage
  • donedealomg 4y ago
    My condolences moved out of vercel and couldn't be happier, what a buggy mess that is
    • quickthrower2 4y ago
      I vouched your comment (was dead...), to see what you think the buggy mess is. I have not seen any bugs but I have only scratched the surface of it.
• rurban 4y ago
  Tried railway (unstable), boyab (unable to setup) and settled with fly.io (easy to setup, stable). all free tiers, even with a free custom domain.
  • justjake 4y ago
    Railway founder here Can you mention what particularly was unstable?
    • rurban 4y ago
      my service was not reachable after two days running. guess the vm wakeup from a an external request was too slow.
• ankit70 4y ago
  Render. As easy as Heroku and migration was easy due to github based deployment. Cost should be same as using $7 instances in both. 3 tiny apps with 10K hits/day. All using Node.
• holografix 4y ago
  Controversial opinion: given the vast majority of answers here: cheapskates looking for free tiers wherever they can find them. Heroku should’ve closed that free tier years ago! Now they added some very very cheap plans as well which is fantastic for them = gets rid of some of the horrendous cost from platform abuse they dealt with every quarter. Good for you Heroku, you were always under appreciated by the enterprise, with their clingy sysadmins and ops people fighting you like a plague and at the same time you were taken advantage of by an army of penny pinchers! Heroku
  • tecleandor 4y ago
    Companies count on the "cheapskates" and the free plans to work as a "gateway drug" to corporate plans. I sometimes feel this services "need" an affordable paid plan, so I don't "freeload" on their free plans, and I don't need the expensive big plan. I.e.: I monitor a bunch of my hobby sites with StatusCake. They're great and I use the free plan but I'd like to pay a little for very simple monitoring. But the first paid plan is around $200 a year. But I don't need the premium plan, I just need the free plan, but paying, so I feel like I'm contributing to the business. AWS and the others... you've got a free plan, but once you begin to deploy... ;) DnsMadeEasy. They don't have a free plan, but I'm using their "Small business 10 domain plan". That was $30 a year for years. Past year was $40. Then they got acquired by DigiCert and since last month they've posted their new prices: ~$200 a year for a 5 domain plan. It happens in a lot of providers, so I guess is a regular VC tactic to acquire volume, clients, publicity or whatever.
    • 0x457 4y ago
      > I monitor a bunch of my hobby sites with StatusCake. They're great and I use the free plan but I'd like to pay a little for very simple monitoring. But the first paid plan is around $200 a year. But I don't need the premium plan, I just need the free plan, but paying, so I feel like I'm contributing to the business. Odd mentality. You don't want to feel like a freeloader, but don't want to pay the asking price.
      • satvikpendem 4y ago
• abcfloorignj 4y ago
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• gw67 4y ago
  Cloud66
• hsn915 4y ago
  Vultr. I program in Go so I get a self-contained executable file at the end of the day that I just upload to the server. So whatever "Heroku" provides is completely irrelevant to me.
• t_sawyer 4y ago
  I moved to a Hetzner dedicated instance with cloudflare in front. Rails Postgres memcached all run on docker. Vs Heroku with cloudflare in front Postgres from heroku and memcached with an add on. 1. Very little. I put the app in docker a long time ago for local development but still used heroku for prod. I dumped my db and imported it into a docker run db on Hetzner. One thing to note: I did not expose the db to the internet. The app connects to the db over a docker network. 2. I do DevOps for a living. 3. It did not add to my learning. 4. $30/month for a large Hetzner dedicated instance and $12 for S3 (backups) vs $25 for the app (I added 2 more for 8 hours a day during busy season) and $25 for a job runner and whatever they were charging for DB. My total cost now is $42/month and on Heroku it was around $120 during busy season and $100 during non busy season. 5. Rails Postgres memcached and delayed job. I had to expand my app tier during busy season by up to 3 instances (winter). With my load testing the Hetzner instance handles much more than the 3 instances ever did in my load testing. 6. I added db dump cron jobs along with restic backups to S3.
  • _JamesA_ 4y ago
    I am curious why you chose S3 over B2?
    • t_sawyer 4y ago
      No real reason other than the fact that I already had an AWS account and I was saving quite a bit of money already. I may look into B2 later. But again, I’m well below my original costs so I may not look for a while.
    • aartav 4y ago
      The advantage B2 offers is lower pricing The advantage S3 offers is seamless integration with other AWS services IMHO, the ease of integration has significant value, it would take a very sizable S3 bill for me to consider not using S3
      • _JamesA_ 4y ago
        I agree. The reason I was asking is because the OP did not appear to be using any other AWS resources.
• anon_436967 4y ago
  We have been running a Rails monolith in Heroku for over 5 years. Our application has pretty strict uptime requirements and in the last 24 months we've had several major outages that were entirely due to Heroku. We're in the range of 5-10 million requests per day. Heroku's erratic performance over the last year or so combined with what we see as a steady decline in the responsiveness (and sometimes quality) of Heroku's support made it too painful to ignore. Their security breach was obviously also a big motivation, but by then we had already made the decision. We are moving as much as we can into GCP. - Web app: Cloud Run - Background jobs: Compute Engine - Heroku Postgres: Google Cloud SQL - Heroku Redis: Redis Cloud (https://redis.com/redis-enterprise-cloud https://redis.com/redis-enterprise-cloud) - Deploys: Custom scripts - Provisioning: Terraform It has taken about 6 months for me to do most of the work, with some help from the team on some of the heavy lifting. It's not full-time work though, so perhaps 3-4 months if you count person-hours. I have decent linux sysadmin experience, but that's about it. Had to brush up on Terraform. Testing GCP services took a long time. Their docs are often good, but important details are sometimes missing or not easy to find when you're doing initial research. I don't trust the GCP console (web UI) much these days; the `gcloud` command shows your actual resources and not some half-baked abstraction. Sometimes resources aren't even visible in the UI. The learnings were valuable for me personally. I've been interested in doing more ops-related things. For the company, the extra control we get over our own service levels is the major benefit. It has a cost in terms of developer experience and resources we need to allocate to ops as well. Costs are about the same. Cloud SQL seems cheaper. Redis Cloud is almost exactly the same price (which feels like a lot tbh). If you're interested in working with us (remotely) with ops, send me an email at other.water6357@fastmail.com
  • seabrookmx 4y ago
    Why Redis cloud over Google Memorystore?
    • anon_436967 4y ago
      We use Redis for the source of truth for some of our data. More key-value store than cache. Pros of Redis Cloud over Google Memorystore for Redis: - Five nines uptime SLA, vs three in GCP. - No sharding support in GCP, which limits scaling write throughput. - GCP persistence is limited to hourly RDB snapshots whereas Redis Cloud supports append only file (AOF). - During migration we needed to access our Redis instances from Heroku. We're not on Heroku's Private Spaces, so we can't set up a VPN. We'd need to set up a proxy like Twemproxy or Envoy to expose the Redis instance but with Redis Cloud we can just make sure the firewall is open. - Redis Cloud's support is pretty awesome. Had an engineer available during our migration. GCPs support is okay at best. Cons: - Memorystore is quite a bit cheaper. - No GCP IAM integration.
• trentprynn 4y ago
  I moved 4 personal websites with a total of 7 services to railway.app (no affiliation) this weekend and was very impressed with how simple it was. Previously these websites were hosted using a combination of GitHub Pages + Heroku + Fly.io but it’s nice to have all of them hosted in a consistent way now. I vastly preferred the railway.app migration to the fly.io migration but fly.io feels much more production ready than railway. This isn’t a big deal as none of the projects I moved have paying users so downtime would be acceptable if it happens. I was able to deploy all of my applications from the UI without ever having to install any company specific CLI which I prefer. Railway being such a small company has lacking docs and is very difficult to google for specific question about the provider —- most “railwayapp” google responses are for actual railways. Pretty much everything was intuitive and didn’t require the docs though which was much more pleasant than my experiences with fly.io. To get the custom domains working I had to move my DNS to cloudflare for all sites which was something I had planned on doing anyways but felt annoying in the moment. I was previously using my domain registrar’s (namecheap) DNS but they don’t seem to support CNAME flattening which allows for CNAME apex domain entries which were required for getting custom domains on railway. I moved all of the services in about a day and everything has been running pretty well. I do think railway is slower than fly but everything is still plenty fast so far. All projects have automatic github deployments which have been working well so far. Overall for a new project made by a small team I have really really enjoyed using railway for hosting. Railway is organized in a way that matches how I think about project hosting and most things seem well thought out with lots of good stuff still coming. The websites moved were https://trentprynn.com https://trentprynn.com https://habitapper.com https://habitapper.com https://weightwatchapp.com https://weightwatchapp.com https://samueldebartolo.com https://samueldebartolo.com these are all open source and can be viewed from my github https://github.com/trentprynn https://github.com/trentprynn
  • TruthWillHurt 4y ago
    $10 per GB per month!
    • trentprynn 4y ago
      Yeah railway's pricing is super confusing -- it will be interesting to see what the total for my (very low traffic) websites will at the end of the month. On the dashboard it currently estimates my total bill for all sites to be $2.82 which means I'll be under their $5/mo free credit. At least they have a very convenient single page where I can see the total for all projects at one time.
• davidhariri 4y ago
  Fly!
• ultra_nick 4y ago
  Linode has predictable costs and simple human support.
  • bongobingo1 4y ago
    Love linode.
• m3nu 4y ago
  I started PikaPods (https://www.pikapods.com/ https://www.pikapods.com/) a few months before the announcement as a simple way to throw up some open source web apps. Part of the mission is also to provide an additional revenue source for FOSS authors with our revenue sharing program. Since then the project has seen good traction and we run a few thousand apps in two regions, EU and US. Anyone still looking for an Heroku alternative, do check us out! There is some free welcome credit to get started quickly.
• patrickserrano 4y ago
  I'm currently working on an MVP and moved it over to railway.app Overall the process was smooth, the React + Vite frontend app was up and running as soon as I connected GitHub and added the envars. But the dotnet backend took a little bit of trial and error to get running because it didn't like my initial Dockerfile. Overall the process has been pretty smooth though I wish the docs were a little more robust and had more examples.
• itake 4y ago
  I moved to fly.io. My costs are about half. The hardest part was copying the database over. The data kept getting corrupted. Everything took about 8 hours. Self-host redis, do not use their free beta app. My app ruby on rails, sidekiq, hasura, redis, postgres, 2m rows, 2-5qps.
• duxup 4y ago
  Cloudflare Pages https://pages.cloudflare.com/ https://pages.cloudflare.com/ I really didn't need much it turns out. Most things were old experiments, testing, fun that I let die. I really just salvaged an old personal page of mine. Setup was super fast, tied to github, very nice features. It's not heroku by any means, but it works for what it is and I really enjoy the simplicity of the setup.
• aetch 4y ago
  I moved a Go app with 20k users/mo from heroku to render. 1. It took about 1 week due to lack of render documentation for Docker and buildpacks. I posted on the render help forum and contacted their support which did respond but were not the most helpful. I ended up finding a single example buildpack file in a render blog post which shed light on how to structure their build system. If I had not found it I dont think I would have been able to get it to work. 2. I don’t have experience with 3rd party deployment frameworks. 3. Learned how to use Docker in order to utilize Renders blueprint feature which would automatically link a redis instance to my hosted app. 4. $0 to $0 Render has a similar interface to Heroku but some missing features and bugs a few of which I’ve found are: No newline/special character support in environment variables. Applications cannot get the public hostname from calling the standard call in the programming language’s library like hostname(). Unlike Heroku where a publicaly reachable host is return, render returns an internal hostname is returned instead.
  • raunak 4y ago
    How was it 0 to 0? Just curious.
  • eropple 4y ago
    (Render hat on) Thanks for the candid feedback! We've been working on our buildpacks-in-Docker support over the last month or so and it's greatly improved, IMO. (I'm biased--I wrote the changes.) So this should be smoother for newcomers. v3 (or the to-be-released v4) of @renderinc/heroku-import should significantly grease the skids for folks looking to make a similar move, and the Render CLI we've got cooking also includes helpers for making ongoing development with buildpacks more reasonable.
• DoesntMatter22 4y ago
  Not a big app but I had a few small sites I ran on Ruby on Heroku. I moved them to a shared hosting provider using PHP. These apps are super basic but I was paying Heroku and realized that PHP would save me a 20 bucks a month and it wouldn't take long. The real benefit is not having to worry about upgrading stacks at EOF and that stuff.
  • linkjuice4all 4y ago
    For years I paid for “unlimited” LAMP shared hosting from one of the many providers for about $150 a year. This was great for hosting personal stuff, side projects, proof of concepts, etc. Recently I started rebuilding some stuff in React/Python and went with Heroku for my backend (before they announced they’re ending the free tier). Professionally I’ve used both AWS and GCP for real/big stuff but I’d love to pay $150 a year for a “personal” instance that has predictable billing at the expense of “pro” feature/uptime. Where are the PaaS flat rate providers for hobby stuff?
• zoomzoom 4y ago
  This is a thread filled with great insight and experience, so thanks for starting it. If you're looking to move from Heroku/PaaS into your own cloud account on GCP or AWS, please take a look at Coherence (withcoherence.com) [I'm a cofounder] Coherence configures managed services in your own cloud such as Cloud Run in GCP or Fargate/ECS in AWS, while adding in all the missing pieces these providers don't include out of the box, such as load balancer/SSL/DNS configuration, database/redis orchestration, CI/CD integration, Cloud IDEs for development, VPC/networking best practices, long-running workers and cron tasks - all with one simple configuration. Coherence itself has a free tier that fits most projects, but you will need to use credits or pay for you usage of your cloud resources. We'd love feedback and are happy to answer any questions, feel free to ping hn@withcoherence.com!
• WrtCdEvrydy 4y ago
  1. Install caprover on a fresh Linode instance. Create captain-definition for each app. Add instances as you need. 2. I'm a pretty knowledgeable DevOps guy. 3. Not really valuable but gives me a bit of Linux experience. 4. Flat instance pricing, was able to get all of my stuff into a $5 instance... however I have been increasing it as I get projects from friends and myself in these. 5. Supports almost everything, it just runs your stuff inside a docker container. 6. I liked Heroku, it's where I started with Rails but it gets ridiculously expensive quickly... there's no reason adding a DB should cost $40.
• alfor 4y ago
  Old school approach: only old boring tech + one bare metal server + free cloudflare - No salt/puppet/ansible, no docker, kubernete, etc. Only standart linux stuff. - All done with makefiles/ssh/git - Send email with Mailgun I try to keep the dependencies as small as possible: external services, programs, libraries. One server can serve an incredible amount of requests if you only do normal web stuff. Login with ssh to get stats with top. Huge performance, snappy, no concern with cost. You could do the same with a vpn It took me quite a bit of time, and it’s not perfect. I need to set up a vpn image as a fall over if the hardware break (low probability)
• tomphoolery 4y ago
  Railway has been on my mind as a possible candidate, but haven't made the move quite yet. https://railway.app/ https://railway.app/ Seems like a similar idea, you give them a Dockerfile and they deploy it somewhere at `$PORT`, and then you listen on that port.
• gosukiwi 4y ago
  I moved to Railway. My little bot barely consumes any resources, so it's free :)
• chadmckenna 4y ago
  I have some personal apps that I use regularly that were being hosted on the free or $7 tier at Heroku, all three were Rails apps with postgres and one needed redis. I spent about 20 hours trying out AWS, Digital Ocean, and Render.com. I eventually decided on Digital Ocean as the ease of use + pricing was where I wanted it to be. I spend about $14/mo on hosting at Digital Ocean (db + apps) and grabbed a free instance on Redis Cloud. Its currently more expensive than Heroku but it does provide me with better especially with my db setup.
• krajzeg 4y ago
  Moved backend services for my videogame from Heroku to Render. It's been super-easy, and the service is more responsive and significantly more stable now on Render, despite me paying much less. 1. Almost no work. The app was Node.js + Postgres, it stayed that way and only needed a few environment variable changes plus a database migration. 2. Almost none, I use PaaS because I concentrate on making games, and want to spend as little time touching infrastructure as possible. 3. Learned mostly that switching PaaS is not a big deal if you stick to common offerings (Postgres instead of a fancy exact-purpose-fit DB). 4. ~$100 to $27/mo 5. A Node.js app that gets rather low traffic but needs to be stable, in the 1000s of req/day. It only handles highscores/ranked mode seeds, so low requirements. 6. Would heartily recommend Render if you want to stay with a Heroku-like PaaS approach and they already support what you need.
  • forgomonika 4y ago
    Thanks for the info - I have some similar use cases. How has the Postgres DB worked out for you with Render? I've been weary of using a relational DB in general since it's a single point of failure and really disruptive if your instance goes down (even with a back-up DB to failover too can be problematic if data doesn't get replicated before a crash). Also are you just using your Node.js app as a back-end server or are you also serving web pages from it?
    • krajzeg 4y ago
      No issues with the Postgres - it's rock-solid so far (100% uptime over 6ish months). Most DBs are going to be a SPOF, unless you're willing to go into a distributed/replicated DB setup (which for my use case, I'm definitely not - I'd rather be down for an hour once in a blue moon). It's an API consumed by the game client, no user-facing webpages.
• 0xpotato 4y ago
  Used to run all my bots (less than 5, doing each 30min - 1hr of computation daily) in Heroku using the free dynos, now moved them all to a Raspberry Pi I had from years ago that I dusted off for this.
  • xu3u32 4y ago
    What do the bots do?
    • 0xpotato 4y ago
      An example here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33099089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33099089
• pier25 4y ago
  Fly.io
• qudat 4y ago
  for security focused apps (hipaa, soc2, iso, gdpr, etc) check out https://aptible.com https://aptible.com
• aantix 4y ago
  For Rails apps, I've moved over to Hatch Box. https://hatchbox.io/ https://hatchbox.io/ Now I can deploy multiple apps to a single server, not have to worry about provisioning. I pay for the single server instance. It's been great for my hobby projects.
  • pelagicAustral 4y ago
    Same here. I manage all my projects via Hatchbox. Use UpCloud for vps and thats it... not free but closes thing for seamless deployments.
• eschatology 4y ago
  Moved from Heroku to Railway: > 5. Summary/description of your apps Simple discord.js bot interface to fire Lambda functions, about roughly 5000 times a month > 1. How much work it took to move apps (be honest) Roughly 2 hours and it's running! Pretty good replacement. > 2. How much experience you had at the time of the migration Experienced with k8s, practically a newbie with heroku-like environment. > 3. How valuable were your learnings? Barely any learning, it was quite straightforward. > 4. Cost comparison My application is pretty low resource so it remains free with the Railway pricing model. > 6. Anything else you want to add Related to point 4. Cost: Heroku did have more extras built-in (logging system, alerting), these are missing in Railway.
• sholladay 4y ago
  I tried many PaaS providers and ended up settling on Render, mostly because of its minimal boilerplate and lack of proprietary tech or vendor lock-in. There is a custom infrastructure-as-code YAML file, but it is optional and pretty nice in its own right, anyway. I get the sense that the Render team cares about DX and doing things the right way for the long term. Moving there from Heroku is simple as the platforms have similar capabilities and there is a migration guide - a day or two unless you are deeply integrated into Heroku’s buildpacks, etc. Heroku recently removed their free tier. Render has a free tier that is pretty generous and very usable. For paid plans, Render pricing is roughly equivalent to Heroku. However, I find Render’s pricing significantly easier to understand and thus more friendly. Heroku has pricing tiers with varying features and sometimes you have to upgrade to get a feature even if you don’t need more resources. Additionally, Heroku can be vague about some of their specs, particularly when it comes to how much CPU you are promised. Render, on the other hand, gives the same features to all paid plans and then the resources just scale up and out. I much prefer Render’s pricing model, even though for me the cost is about the same. My one major gripe about Render is that they don’t have a CLI. I find a CLI to be a very important part of any PaaS. Heroku has a great CLI, Render doesn’t, and the feature request to create one has been open for three years. Clearly it was not a priority for them. That said, the ticket did just get marked as In Progress a few days ago, so I am optimistic, but we will have to see where that leads. https://render.com/ https://render.com/ https://feedback.render.com/features/p/render-cli https://feedback.render.com/features/p/render-cli
  • eropple 4y ago
    (Render hat on) > My one major gripe about Render is that they don’t have a CLI. ... That said, the ticket did just get marked as In Progress a few days ago, so I am optimistic, but we will have to see where that leads. Watch this space. Since coming onboard, the CLI became one of my biggest goals. But I'm new here and I forgot to mark it as In Progress on the feedback site. Sorry about that. ;)
  • endorphine 4y ago
    My main gripe with Render is they don't support adding Cloudflare CDN to cache static assets with far-future settings. Rails apps have hashed assets that change when the asset content changes, so it's needlessly bad for performance to not cache them. This is a feature that's been in the "Planned" stage for some years now, one of the most upvoted ones, but unfortunately still not there.
• ryantgtg 4y ago
  Dokku + DigitalOcean droplet and managed postgres. 1. The migration - from "I just learned about Dokku" to "deployed my app for testing" - took about two hours. 2. I'm an urban planner who dabbles in front-end development. DevOps is not my thing. 3. Not too valuable of learnings. Overall, the dokku commands are almost identical to heroku commands (by design). So the transition was smooth and comfortable. 4. Costs: I chose droplet and postgres services with DO that equaled our heroku costs. But we get about 4x the ram now. The site is much faster. 5. Rails/postgres. We don't track hits, but it's pretty popular in terms of, uh, maps for finding pinball machines. 6. I haven't figured out how to set up logging. I would like some kind of "last 5 days of logs, being piped to somewhere." It seems simple, but I don't quite get it yet. I also miss the "usage" metrics from heroku that showed ram and stuff throughout the day. But I guess I pretty much get that with DO and Scout APM.
  • josegonzalez 4y ago
    Late reply, but you might want to checkout our Vector integration for log shipping. You can ship your logs to whatever service you want. Disclosure: I'm the Dokku maintainer.
• btouellette 4y ago
  Picked up a NUC and moving my apps there (several BE only things like bots with FE served off GH Pages and one small app with some server processing that gets like 600 unique visitors a month). They were all served off the Heroku domain anyway so I'll just move them to DynDNS. Will take several years to make it worth not just paying Heroku but at least I won't have to play this game again when Render or Fly.io end up having to restrict their free tiers as well.
• a9ex 4y ago
  I moved to a $5 DigitalOcean droplet running Dokku (dokku.com). To answer your questions: 1) 2 hours for 8 apps — most work was setup of new DNS and testing 2) I have very litte experience in DevOps 3) I think its totally worth it for the additional flexibility and the super cheap cost 4) Just $5 - can’t beat that 5) 8 Ruby Sinatra sites w/ a total of 20k hits/month
• nkotov 4y ago
  I used to believe there was a future in having a "heroku-like" PaaS on top of your AWS/GCP/Azure. Enough so that I tried to built a company that would be an offering in the space. The reality is that each of the major cloud providers have gotten so good that it basically defeats the purpose of having your own PaaS on top of them. For 95% of cases, the default products from each cloud provider is good enough now. It's all very easy now. So the remaining bucket from Heroku that still needs to be filled is for those who have small or side projects and aren't willing to pay (a lot) for hosting. If you're trying to build a business around these "customers", you will be in a world of hurt and just racing to the bottom dollar.
• slugiscool99 4y ago
  Vercel has been awesome for us - they've solved all these little pain points that really add up. Definitely a great starter service like what Heroku was. Also free for individuals.
• pawelwentpawel 4y ago
  1. It was right after the first MVP was hosted on Heroku so not that much work. I had to write Dockerfiles and set up a CI/CD myself (Github Actions thank you). 2. I'm a dev with a bit of DevOps experience but mostly as a user. I still have to run to my DevOps friends for help occasionally :) 3. I learned tons. Most usefully setting up the entire CI/CD myself and Dockerizing my setup. 4. Cost is one of the main reasons why I moved. Digital Ocean is much more cost efficient for CPU intensive instances (my backend runs audio/video and physics). For the web app, Digital Ocean Apps are a bit more pricey than just running a droplet but save me loads of time. 5. I run a spatial video meeting app (https://flat.social https://flat.social). Tech stack is Node, Next.js, Mediasoup and Typescript. The traffic is rather spiky - anything from a 50-60 users on a chill Sunday to over 25k website hits from Reddit during xmas.
• chasd00 4y ago
  Years ago I used Heroku but I've moved everything to Dokku running on Linode with no issues. Dokku is basically the same thing.
• geoffharcourt 4y ago
  We moved off of Heroku in late-May/early-June of this year. It took a few weeks of half-time work for one person to make everything happen. We were already using Docker in CI, so we didn't need to spend much time making our app work in Docker for production. We paid the $500 for Porter's "white glove" migration service because we figured it would be useful to be able to get quick feedback about choices and changes. We had some AWS experience from running our backing services (RDS, Elasticsearch, Memcached, Redis) on AWS despite doing compute on Heroku for a long time, but we'd never done EC2 or EKS for deployments on AWS. Despite having been on Porter now for months, I'd say we still don't know or really need to know a ton about k8s, but we are familiar with some basics around pod sizing, healthchecks, deployments, etc. I think Porter does a lot to put themselves out as as destination for people leaving Heroku. I'm not sure if this would have been more work to do something like Render, but I was very pleased with the timeframe, hours spent, and the ease of cutting over. We have a monolith that handles ~50k/min traffic at peak use as well as a couple very tiny services that do some accessory stuff. All the apps are Rails apps. One of the reasons that we chose Porter over other options is that we really liked their setup for Preview Environments, which are an important part of our workflow here. The experience of running preview apps on Porter is notably better than on Heroku, where we started to see a lot of unreliable behavior on app launch that resulted in the app being unusable and the only fix was to close and open a new PR . On the whole this was a really positive experience for us. We're seeing better performance, we're paying less (in Porter + AWS compute combined) than we did for Heroku Enterprise, and our ability to deploy mid-day when we're under load is better than it was before. I've spent most of my 12 years or so of Rails development working on Heroku (and we had been on Heroku for almost six years), so we had some fear around moving to unfamiliar tooling, but this has been a big win for us.
• chris_st 4y ago
  I'm using two services, fly.io and encore.dev. Both are wonderful, but different worlds. fly.io (as others have mentioned below) lets you build a Docker image and run that. I've found having them serve static files lets me not include caddy in my app (simple go-based website). encore.dev is, in effect, a URL service. You write go code with comments that say which path goes to that function, and it takes care of routing for you. They have a lot of ancillary services (cron jobs, database, queue, etc.) that integrate very nicely. Different way to write code, but it seems to work very well (it watches a git repository and rebuilds when you push).
• ceecko 4y ago
  Founder of EvenNode here - https://www.evennode.com https://www.evennode.com We don't have big marketing budgets and are a less known alternative, but we see influx of new customers moving off of Heroku every day. It's mostly Node.js and Python apps since we focus on this stack. The migration is very simple - git push evennode main. This works for most of the apps without any extra steps required. It's really this simple. Cost is cheaper than Heroku - 4.50 EUR / month. Each app also gets its own MongoDB database at no additional cost. The biggest advantage I see, compared to VPS, Lightsail, etc., is you get a fully hosted and monitored platform. A server goes down? No problem, your app is migrated to a new one automatically. I would says a pretty good alternative to self-hosting and Heroku.
• jfrisby 4y ago
  Almost, but not quite the audience for your question. I was going to use Heroku, but the security requirements for my app made that a non-option. Instead, I went with simple Terraform that spins up CoreOS nodes, using cloud-init to spin up Docker containers. CI process built the Docker images, and deploying was just a matter of making an ECR tag point at the new image then cycling instances. Not quite as simple as Heroku, but pretty close. I moved onto AWS via this: https://registry.terraform.io/namespaces/GoCarrot https://registry.terraform.io/namespaces/GoCarrot No k8s. No Docker. Beautifully clean system. Blue/green deploys with automatic rollback. Continuous deployment (there's a CircleCI orb as well). Tightly buttoned-down system configuration. Debian built from scratch with an eye towards supply chain security. (There's a root image factory and base image factory to handle the layering of image build processes involved.) Log aggregation and configuration management baked in. Security that can only be described as "insanely paranoid, yet oddly pragmatic." Cascaded image builds, so I can update the entirety of my infrastructure by pushing one button to kick things off then clicking a few buttons to approve deployment of the various services. 1. About a week, although I had the assistance of the author. I'm now rebuilding my personal infra on Omat and it's going much more quickly. Probably 3 days total, with no assistance. 2. More experience with DevOps stuff than most, but not a DevOps person by any stretch. 3. Very, very, very instructive. 4. Given what I was coming from, cost-neutral. Compared to Heroku? Notably cheaper. 5. At present, we're in alpha so traffic is negligible and back-end workload is fairly minimal (tens of thousands of jobs per day). The author of the tools, however, is CTO of a mid-tier SaaS that handles a quite significant (millions of transactions/day, IIRC) amount of traffic, and he is super aggressive about not being hobbled on performance needs -- but also being cost-efficient. 6. Avoiding the k8s iceberg, while having all the modern amenities in a system I actually have a hope of understanding top-to-bottom (modulo my hesitation around reading the systemd source) is nice. This system is an object lesson in "loosely coupled, highly cohesive" design. I haven't felt at any point that I may be stuck in a You Can't Get There From Here situation. Avoiding layering a second layer of software-defined networking (Docker/k8s) on top of the software-defined networking of AWS means I neatly avoid the single biggest source of chronic issues (and, via the workarounds needed, system complexity) that I've experienced with "modern" (Docker/k8s) DevOps approaches.
• robswc 4y ago
  Digital Ocean + Dokku = Heroku ;) Or... at least as close as you can get. I actually preferred it before the heroku thing.
• rovr138 4y ago
  I moved 1 thing to Github with GitHub actions. The rest I kept on Heroku and paid. I use it and they should be paid for it. Why not?
• 93po 4y ago
  Literally anywhere else
• srijanshetty 4y ago
  Front-end: - vercel.com - nginx load balanced next.js apps running on digital ocean Back-end: - fly.io - nginx load balanced python/node apps running on digital ocean
• phendrenad2 4y ago
  I didn't, I actually moved more things into Heroku because it wasn't worth the effort to maintain the platforms myself.
• vooxy 4y ago
  I used AWS because of PCI compliance, and it was HELL. It took a whole week to set up a simple EKS cluster for one basic Rails app. Everything is ridiculously complicated, and the docs are terrible. When the Log4j exploit occurred, I had to go and figure out how to search the logs. I had to request them to make an update manually, and it took them 3 days to do it! Cloudwatch is terrible. EKS UX is terrible. Unless you want to have a full-time job of wasting time with AWS, stay away! Cost is horrible as well. Heroku was $7/month and AWS around $80. Fortunately there are several good options. After seeing HN posts recently, fly.io seems popular.
• ida-silver 4y ago
  For simple web apps? Netlify/Vercel for frontend + Serverless for backend (AWS, Lolo) 1. Maybe a day 2. Not a lot 3. You learn event-driven architecture but it wasn't new to me 4. It's free for me as long as you don't attach a company github with Netlfiy or Vercel (then you move out of free tier) and then AWS has enough free credits, Lolo is free for your first two apps (although a bit of a hassle to have to re-deploy every 7 days if you don't want to pay 9€) 5. Web platform primarily with maybe 10-30k hits per month, but also a few web apps. Maybe move the Serverless api from AWS when it increases to not incur too much of a cost.
• kika 4y ago
  We went from Heroku to a self-hosted OpenShift cluster on AWS EC2 for compute and managed AWS services for state (RDS and Elasticache). 1. A few months. The actual changes to the apps were not fundamental, but we discovered a lot of things we didn't know about our own codebase and it had to be fixed. The majority of changes were devops plumbing not Ruby/Rails. The move itself, including all the necessary admin changes and supplemental work took about 1.5 years from decision to cut off date. 2. Me - about 30 years of total experience, 10+ years of devops/SW mixed experience. But total Ruby noob (and still is, you don't need to know Ruby to move apps) 3. The move made me a multimillionaire and a couple people billionaires and another 100 or so millionaires or multimillionaires. I mean this move opened the path to the IPO and we became one of meme-stocks of 2021. So even if I never touch AWS, Openshift, Heroku or Ruby it was totally worth it. I didn't learn any fundamental new things (after 30 years in the industry it rarely happens), but solidified my skills in many departments. I never run such a massive containerized workload before, for example. 4. Nobody cared actually. We grew like bamboo at that moment, so very difficult to compare apples to apples. 5. A single monolithic app about 0.5M LOC and a few smaller ones. Hundreds thousands of customers, tens of millions of revenue/month