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I tried Neon a few months ago when attempting to switch away from a self hosted db. It was a horrible experience, customer support was unhelpful, it was glitchy

by t1c 2y ago

I tried Neon a few months ago when attempting to switch away from a self hosted db. It was a horrible experience, customer support was unhelpful, it was glitchy, slow, and laggy, and even before the price increase their pricing was way too high.

compootr 2y ago
adding on, didn't they also hide the percentages from their status page because it was going down so much?
- tristan957 2y ago
  We did not hide it because it was going down. We hid it because it was an incorrect calculation. We are currently re-doing the our status page to look more like Snowflake's. I don't have any proof, but you'll just have to trust me, which could be a tough ask. Neon really tries to be transparent in internal and external communication. (Neon engineer)
clarkbw 2y ago
woof, that does not sound good. Can you say more about how you were connecting? What was slow / gitchy and laggy? Feel free to reach to over DM to me with your project details. (neon empl)
- codetrotter 2y ago
  > Feel free to reach to over DM to me with your project details. I’m not the parent commenter but just giving you a heads up that your HN profile doesn’t list any socials so I don’t know if people will find how to DM you. Unless you guys have a public Discord or something and it’s implied that that is how people would be able to DM you.
  - clarkbw 2y ago
    TY, fixed. Neon does have a public Discord https://discord.gg/92vNTzKDGp https://discord.gg/92vNTzKDGp
- t1c 2y ago
  We were connecting over `pg` (NodeJS). The web dashboard was constantly logging me out and was overall a mess (although I'd imagine it might be a bit better now, given GA?). There's no DMs on HackerNews btw
  - password4321 2y ago
    node-postgres (pg, probably more specifically pg-pool) doesn't do too well with serverless, not handling TCP connections killed while in the pool (or something): https://github.com/brianc/node-postgres/issues/2112 https://github.com/brianc/node-postgres/issues/2112 (open since 2020) A nice marketing opportunity for Neon/Supabase to get a fix officially released.
    - tristan957 2y ago
      I made a note in our internal Neon slack. Thanks!
mj4e 2y ago
(Neon PM) saddened to read this if I can help with anything you can reach me directly mike@neon.tech
- t1c 2y ago
  Hi Mike, I appreciate that, but I don't think I see myself using Neon anytime soon, if at all.
  - tristan957 2y ago
    If you're interested, our team also takes negative feedback to create points of emphasis on where we can improve. But I understand that takes time out of your day.
maccaw 2y ago
Fwiw my experience has been the exact opposite. It is by far away, the best serverless database I’ve used.
csomar 2y ago
I couldn't try it because it had no email sign-up. Which is kind of weird for something that offer a tech (hosting essentially) product.
- mj4e 2y ago
  (Neon PM) You can use email+password, GitHub, Google or Hasura credentials to sign up at https://console.neon.tech/signup https://console.neon.tech/signup
- virtuozzz 2y ago
  it has an email sign-up
  - csomar 2y ago
    That was last year: https://community.neon.tech/t/signup-and-rust-support/955 https://community.neon.tech/t/signup-and-rust-support/955 Good that they added it now.
- tristan957 2y ago
  We have an email sign-up now.
MentallyRetired 2y ago
I've had nothing but good experiences with them.
lonerranger 2y ago
Neon is so unreliable that they removed the percentages from their status website. A truly bad thing for a data company to do.
- tristan957 2y ago
  They were calculated incorrectly, actually. This is something we are actively working on. We hoped to have it back for GA, but it didn't make it. (Neon engineer) Edit: to be more specific, we will have a new calculations similar to how Snowflake does theirs.
  - throwaway5959 2y ago
    I’m not sure that’s much better?
    - tristan957 2y ago
      Wanted to let you know that I have edited my comment. Here is the Snowflake page for reference by the way: https://status.snowflake.com/ https://status.snowflake.com/. Hope that helps!
      - throwaway5959 2y ago
        Thanks!
- shinypokemon 2y ago
  (Neon DevRel) Hey, we do want to add numbers back to that page. The issue was that the original numbers were inaccurate. "The goal of this metric is to represent the health of a system. However, we found this binary “is there an incident or not” approach wasn’t accurate for describing our service. For example, in the past 30 days, 99.9% of projects hosted on Neon had an uptime better than 99.95%; however, the status page displayed 99.89% uptime." (source: https://neon.tech/blog/multi-tenant-uptime https://neon.tech/blog/multi-tenant-uptime)
r3trohack3r 2y ago
This has not been my experience. I've migrated my customer's workloads over to neon's managed postrgres and it's been consistent and reliable for the use case. I have nightly backups pushed to Cloudflare R2 triggered by a GitHub action for disaster recovery but, to date, I haven't had to touch those.
boomskats 2y ago
Curious about your self-hosted db - was it also Postgres? How much had you played with pg before you tried Neon? Can you expand what you mean by 'glitchy, slow and laggy'? Slow connection due to cold starts? Scale-up? General inconsistency in performance? What kind of data volumes were you working with? I ask because my experience with Neon has been completely different to what you just described. Ever since their 'closed beta' days, it has always 'just worked'. Their CLI has been great, none of my automation has ever bombed out without good reason, and I've never seen it cost me more than I expected. Notably, I was also able to self-host it with relative ease, and found that they actually encouraged people to do so. (In contrast, there are a number of similar 'open source' offerings such as Supabase that I've tried self-hosting, and found that while their core codebase is on GH, it is extremely difficult to deploy outside of their own environment. Not intended as a dig at Supabase, they do some really great work and contribute a ton back to the Postgres community - I'm just using them as a relevant example). As an aside, I've also met people from Neon at various conferences, including co-founder Heikki. They all struck me as genuine Postgres enthusiasts & great fun to geek out with. Neon (like Supabase) have been _really_ pushing the envelope on Postgres for the last couple of years, and have sponsored some significant developments & proposals. In my view they're a 'real OSS company'. While that probably does rose-tint my view of them a little, that's important to me & makes me happier to give them my money. They've certainly done more for Postgres than AWS ever has.
- mattashii 2y ago
  Thank you for the confidence and praise! I do believe we, Neon, try to be as open as possible while also trying to build a business around this open source product. I'm a proud PostgreSQL contributor myself and value the work of my collegues highly. However, it should be said that AWS' RDS PostgreSQL offering in late '13 significantly helped increase PostgreSQL adoption, and the recent contributions by AWS' own PostgreSQL Contributors Team should not be discounted. IIUC, their Aurora PostgreSQL offering also was the inspiration for Neon as a product, so I don't think that your last jab to AWS was justified like that.
  - boomskats 2y ago
    Thanks for that, I'll go do some reading.
shever73 2y ago
Another satisfied Neon user here. We migrated our tooling, users and thousands of databases recently and it has just worked.
- coreyward 2y ago
  How recently? They had 12 significant outages in a 2.5 month period in Q4 2023. Maybe should have done your homework before switching. https://x.com/coreyward/status/1734647763151851878 https://x.com/coreyward/status/1734647763151851878
  - shever73 2y ago
    Since January 1st this year. We considered other PaaS providers, but Neon offered the best integration with our existing tooling. We have an SLA in place and haven’t had a single issue so far.

by t1c 2y ago

compootr 2y ago

adding on, didn't they also hide the percentages from their status page because it was going down so much?

tristan957 2y ago
We did not hide it because it was going down. We hid it because it was an incorrect calculation. We are currently re-doing the our status page to look more like Snowflake's. I don't have any proof, but you'll just have to trust me, which could be a tough ask. Neon really tries to be transparent in internal and external communication. (Neon engineer)

clarkbw 2y ago

woof, that does not sound good. Can you say more about how you were connecting? What was slow / gitchy and laggy? Feel free to reach to over DM to me with your project details. (neon empl)

codetrotter 2y ago
> Feel free to reach to over DM to me with your project details. I’m not the parent commenter but just giving you a heads up that your HN profile doesn’t list any socials so I don’t know if people will find how to DM you. Unless you guys have a public Discord or something and it’s implied that that is how people would be able to DM you.
- clarkbw 2y ago
  TY, fixed. Neon does have a public Discord https://discord.gg/92vNTzKDGp https://discord.gg/92vNTzKDGp
t1c 2y ago
We were connecting over `pg` (NodeJS). The web dashboard was constantly logging me out and was overall a mess (although I'd imagine it might be a bit better now, given GA?). There's no DMs on HackerNews btw
- password4321 2y ago
  node-postgres (pg, probably more specifically pg-pool) doesn't do too well with serverless, not handling TCP connections killed while in the pool (or something): https://github.com/brianc/node-postgres/issues/2112 https://github.com/brianc/node-postgres/issues/2112 (open since 2020) A nice marketing opportunity for Neon/Supabase to get a fix officially released.
  - tristan957 2y ago
    I made a note in our internal Neon slack. Thanks!

mj4e 2y ago

(Neon PM) saddened to read this if I can help with anything you can reach me directly mike@neon.tech

t1c 2y ago
Hi Mike, I appreciate that, but I don't think I see myself using Neon anytime soon, if at all.
- tristan957 2y ago
  If you're interested, our team also takes negative feedback to create points of emphasis on where we can improve. But I understand that takes time out of your day.

maccaw 2y ago

Fwiw my experience has been the exact opposite. It is by far away, the best serverless database I’ve used.

csomar 2y ago

I couldn't try it because it had no email sign-up. Which is kind of weird for something that offer a tech (hosting essentially) product.

mj4e 2y ago
(Neon PM) You can use email+password, GitHub, Google or Hasura credentials to sign up at https://console.neon.tech/signup https://console.neon.tech/signup
virtuozzz 2y ago
it has an email sign-up
- csomar 2y ago
  That was last year: https://community.neon.tech/t/signup-and-rust-support/955 https://community.neon.tech/t/signup-and-rust-support/955 Good that they added it now.
tristan957 2y ago
We have an email sign-up now.

MentallyRetired 2y ago

I've had nothing but good experiences with them.

lonerranger 2y ago

Neon is so unreliable that they removed the percentages from their status website. A truly bad thing for a data company to do.

tristan957 2y ago
They were calculated incorrectly, actually. This is something we are actively working on. We hoped to have it back for GA, but it didn't make it. (Neon engineer) Edit: to be more specific, we will have a new calculations similar to how Snowflake does theirs.
- throwaway5959 2y ago
  I’m not sure that’s much better?
  - tristan957 2y ago
    Wanted to let you know that I have edited my comment. Here is the Snowflake page for reference by the way: https://status.snowflake.com/ https://status.snowflake.com/. Hope that helps!
    - throwaway5959 2y ago
      Thanks!
shinypokemon 2y ago
(Neon DevRel) Hey, we do want to add numbers back to that page. The issue was that the original numbers were inaccurate. "The goal of this metric is to represent the health of a system. However, we found this binary “is there an incident or not” approach wasn’t accurate for describing our service. For example, in the past 30 days, 99.9% of projects hosted on Neon had an uptime better than 99.95%; however, the status page displayed 99.89% uptime." (source: https://neon.tech/blog/multi-tenant-uptime https://neon.tech/blog/multi-tenant-uptime)

r3trohack3r 2y ago

This has not been my experience. I've migrated my customer's workloads over to neon's managed postrgres and it's been consistent and reliable for the use case. I have nightly backups pushed to Cloudflare R2 triggered by a GitHub action for disaster recovery but, to date, I haven't had to touch those.

boomskats 2y ago

Curious about your self-hosted db - was it also Postgres? How much had you played with pg before you tried Neon? Can you expand what you mean by 'glitchy, slow and laggy'? Slow connection due to cold starts? Scale-up? General inconsistency in performance? What kind of data volumes were you working with? I ask because my experience with Neon has been completely different to what you just described. Ever since their 'closed beta' days, it has always 'just worked'. Their CLI has been great, none of my automation has ever bombed out without good reason, and I've never seen it cost me more than I expected. Notably, I was also able to self-host it with relative ease, and found that they actually encouraged people to do so. (In contrast, there are a number of similar 'open source' offerings such as Supabase that I've tried self-hosting, and found that while their core codebase is on GH, it is extremely difficult to deploy outside of their own environment. Not intended as a dig at Supabase, they do some really great work and contribute a ton back to the Postgres community - I'm just using them as a relevant example). As an aside, I've also met people from Neon at various conferences, including co-founder Heikki. They all struck me as genuine Postgres enthusiasts & great fun to geek out with. Neon (like Supabase) have been _really_ pushing the envelope on Postgres for the last couple of years, and have sponsored some significant developments & proposals. In my view they're a 'real OSS company'. While that probably does rose-tint my view of them a little, that's important to me & makes me happier to give them my money. They've certainly done more for Postgres than AWS ever has.

mattashii 2y ago
Thank you for the confidence and praise! I do believe we, Neon, try to be as open as possible while also trying to build a business around this open source product. I'm a proud PostgreSQL contributor myself and value the work of my collegues highly. However, it should be said that AWS' RDS PostgreSQL offering in late '13 significantly helped increase PostgreSQL adoption, and the recent contributions by AWS' own PostgreSQL Contributors Team should not be discounted. IIUC, their Aurora PostgreSQL offering also was the inspiration for Neon as a product, so I don't think that your last jab to AWS was justified like that.
- boomskats 2y ago
  Thanks for that, I'll go do some reading.

shever73 2y ago

Another satisfied Neon user here. We migrated our tooling, users and thousands of databases recently and it has just worked.

coreyward 2y ago
How recently? They had 12 significant outages in a 2.5 month period in Q4 2023. Maybe should have done your homework before switching. https://x.com/coreyward/status/1734647763151851878 https://x.com/coreyward/status/1734647763151851878
- shever73 2y ago
  Since January 1st this year. We considered other PaaS providers, but Neon offered the best integration with our existing tooling. We have an SLA in place and haven’t had a single issue so far.