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Kinda refreshing - within the ever growing genre of stories about Heroku's downfall into junk status - to find such an article with a higher level of detail and

Kinda refreshing - within the ever growing genre of stories about Heroku's downfall into junk status - to find such an article with a higher level of detail and analysis of the origins of the problem. There's one thing that somewhat surprised me though: this line: > "In 2018 Heroku was pretty much the only option for a newbie like me to get started with web-development" Was it? Really? I mean, I'm not saying the author did anything wrong in choosing Heroku at the time (after all, who could have known back then what a dumpster fire Heroku would turn out to be), and the commercial success Heroku achieved before going down the gutter shows that it must have had some good reasons going for it, at least on paper before the users are confronted with problems that make them judge the situation differently… … but I don't really get where that "pretty much the only option" vibe would come from. Maybe It's just me having completely different selection criteria, but from my perspective, there were lots of other options to "get started with web-development" and Heroku was just one among many. I don't see at all by what measure Heroku would have seemed like "pretty much the only option"?

shibel 3y ago
Hi. I’m the author. First off, happy to hear you find that refreshing - it’s a really nice compliment to hear! I, like you, hate blanket statements. Perhaps I should I’ve emphasized a newbie like me in that sentence? I really knew next to nothing about how web development, and specifically serving your site from a server, works.
jazzyjackson 3y ago
Assuming they wanted a webserver + database and wanted to learn web stuff, not server admin / unix stuff to configure a LAMP stack or whathaveyou + certbot etc. Deploying on your own domain of legitimately daunting without a lot of prerequisite knowledge. Heroku automated a lot of that and some people learned it as the only way to deploy without learning the manual process first, and that's fine IMO.
danjac 3y ago
Let's say you have never deployed anything to production before, and you've worked through a tutorial in Rails or Django or whatever and just built your first web app, and it's 2018, what are your options? There's the zoo of AWS. Maybe there's something there you can use - Lightsail came out I think in 2016 - but good luck trying to find it out of all the plethora of weirdly named services. Again, total beginner here, and AWS can be daunting even to experienced developers. You can go with Linode or Digital Ocean. You would need to set up a VM with all the dependencies and make it secure. Oh and you'll need a database - should that sit on another VM? What about backup and restore? What about deployment? Sure, you can use Ansible, but that's yet another learning curve. Render launched in 2019. Fly.io came out 2020. As far as I remember, there wasn't a competitor that offered the sheer convenience for the hobbyist beginner on the level of Heroku.
- cooljacob204 3y ago
  I used a digital ocean ubuntu droplet with haproxy and certbot back when I first started off. Used their Postgres service for the database and only opened port 443 and 80 to public traffic. Droplet backups for backups if the vm needed and deployments were a manual git pull. Sure a little complicated but there are plenty of good tutorials out there. I would say Heroku for a new dev is not actually ideal. It hides way too much of the inner workings and makes it harder to learn about web development. I think it's more appropriate for a startup which just wants a ci/cd pipeline and some redundancy without investing that much time into it.
  - danjac 3y ago
    Digital Ocean's Postgres service launched in 2019. I mean sure, you can learn all the other bits and pieces and I have no doubt learning them is valuable, but for a novice who just wanted to get something out there - beyond a static website - Heroku was hard to beat. Sure, it got expensive fast, and that's when you should learn how to manage hosting on your own. But at that point you had more of an idea what you needed and why.
- rtsil 3y ago
  Ten years before that, I rented a cheap dedicated server and learned to use Webmin and Virtualmin. And it wasn't particularly complicated, Virtualmin gave you everything you needed with minimal configuration and you could find plenty of help online for the rest. And it gave you a certain idea of how it worked, instead of operating on a black box.
- govolckurself 3y ago
  Why is "learn more about how to properly host something" never an option for people? And in 2018! Suck it up and learn how to secure a VM, folks, especially if you're turning tutorials into production services. Most of those issues don't just go away when someone builds yet another expensive abstraction on top of a server, I promise.
  - danjac 3y ago
hot_gril 3y ago
What's an alternative to Heroku with the same level of ease and establishment? AppEngine is established but not easy, for example. I still have some smaller projects running on Heroku. Was running a mid-scale one that we shut down for unrelated business reasons. It's been fine.
paxys 3y ago
Yeah I'd only agree with that statement in like 2009. By 2018 there were a hundred equally fully-featured PaaS options to choose from.

shibel 3y ago

Hi. I’m the author. First off, happy to hear you find that refreshing - it’s a really nice compliment to hear! I, like you, hate blanket statements. Perhaps I should I’ve emphasized a newbie like me in that sentence? I really knew next to nothing about how web development, and specifically serving your site from a server, works.

jazzyjackson 3y ago

Assuming they wanted a webserver + database and wanted to learn web stuff, not server admin / unix stuff to configure a LAMP stack or whathaveyou + certbot etc. Deploying on your own domain of legitimately daunting without a lot of prerequisite knowledge. Heroku automated a lot of that and some people learned it as the only way to deploy without learning the manual process first, and that's fine IMO.

danjac 3y ago

Let's say you have never deployed anything to production before, and you've worked through a tutorial in Rails or Django or whatever and just built your first web app, and it's 2018, what are your options? There's the zoo of AWS. Maybe there's something there you can use - Lightsail came out I think in 2016 - but good luck trying to find it out of all the plethora of weirdly named services. Again, total beginner here, and AWS can be daunting even to experienced developers. You can go with Linode or Digital Ocean. You would need to set up a VM with all the dependencies and make it secure. Oh and you'll need a database - should that sit on another VM? What about backup and restore? What about deployment? Sure, you can use Ansible, but that's yet another learning curve. Render launched in 2019. Fly.io came out 2020. As far as I remember, there wasn't a competitor that offered the sheer convenience for the hobbyist beginner on the level of Heroku.

cooljacob204 3y ago
I used a digital ocean ubuntu droplet with haproxy and certbot back when I first started off. Used their Postgres service for the database and only opened port 443 and 80 to public traffic. Droplet backups for backups if the vm needed and deployments were a manual git pull. Sure a little complicated but there are plenty of good tutorials out there. I would say Heroku for a new dev is not actually ideal. It hides way too much of the inner workings and makes it harder to learn about web development. I think it's more appropriate for a startup which just wants a ci/cd pipeline and some redundancy without investing that much time into it.
- danjac 3y ago
  Digital Ocean's Postgres service launched in 2019. I mean sure, you can learn all the other bits and pieces and I have no doubt learning them is valuable, but for a novice who just wanted to get something out there - beyond a static website - Heroku was hard to beat. Sure, it got expensive fast, and that's when you should learn how to manage hosting on your own. But at that point you had more of an idea what you needed and why.
rtsil 3y ago
Ten years before that, I rented a cheap dedicated server and learned to use Webmin and Virtualmin. And it wasn't particularly complicated, Virtualmin gave you everything you needed with minimal configuration and you could find plenty of help online for the rest. And it gave you a certain idea of how it worked, instead of operating on a black box.
govolckurself 3y ago
Why is "learn more about how to properly host something" never an option for people? And in 2018! Suck it up and learn how to secure a VM, folks, especially if you're turning tutorials into production services. Most of those issues don't just go away when someone builds yet another expensive abstraction on top of a server, I promise.
- danjac 3y ago

hot_gril 3y ago

What's an alternative to Heroku with the same level of ease and establishment? AppEngine is established but not easy, for example. I still have some smaller projects running on Heroku. Was running a mid-scale one that we shut down for unrelated business reasons. It's been fine.

paxys 3y ago

Yeah I'd only agree with that statement in like 2009. By 2018 there were a hundred equally fully-featured PaaS options to choose from.