4 ms·

Genuine question, who even uses Heroku anymore? A VPS (hetzner, etc) + managed postgres DB (supabase / AWS / etc) or a local one might more more than enough th

Genuine question, who even uses Heroku anymore? A VPS (hetzner, etc) + managed postgres DB (supabase / AWS / etc) or a local one might more more than enough these days.

Andugal 2y ago
For a lot of use cases, nothing beats « git push » and tada your app is deployed.
- zdragnar 2y ago
  Very easy to do with GitHub actions or the equivalent in gitlab and probably other competitors by now I imagine. If you wanted to spend money on something else, circleci and others help manage ci/cd as well.
  - icedchai 2y ago
    Not to mention every cloud provider has something built in (AWS CodeBuild, GCP Cloud Build, etc.)
- csjh 2y ago
  That’s a pretty standard feature nowadays
risyachka 2y ago
probably those who don't want to set uptime alerts, fine-tune configs, set up backups and restores (which are essential because sooner rather later someone always deletes a few rows/tables) and want to focus on business
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
davepeck 2y ago
I do, as do several startups I advise. Despite interesting competition, my feeling is that the Heroku of 2024 remains... Heroku. I feel this way even though -- depending on how you segment -- the list of "interesting" competitors is quite long at this point: Render, Railway, Northflank, Fly.io, Vercel, DO App Platform, etc.
- fellowniusmonk 2y ago
  I revisit heroku alts every ~6months and I am shocked how not ergonomic they still are, I switched to DO VPS + Ansible Container & Github Actions for any project that doesn't need infinite scale after Salesforce paused heroku development but I'd go back to literally any heroku clone. It's crazy how the ergonomic still just aren't there.
  - davepeck 2y ago
    Yes, completely agree; I'm equally surprised by the poor DXes. (And: bugs. I'm also surprised by the kinds of issues I run into on some of those sites in my list -- problems that, even if not show-stopping, feel like revealing indicators of quality.)
    - MuffinFlavored 2y ago
      > Yes, completely agree; I'm equally surprised by the poor DXes. Any specifics/examples? I find it hard to imagine those "big name" companies/platforms you just mentioned don't have entire teams dedicated to hyper-optimizing experience.
      - vasco 2y ago
        Having a dedicated team doesn't mean anything about the end result.
- strix_varius 2y ago
  IME the Heroku of 2024 is Render.
  - yangcheng 2y ago
    Can you elaborate a bit more why render is good? we are on heroku and I have evaluated alternatives every 6 months since heroku/github outage 2 years ago [1]. But I don't see how render is better. 2 years ago render postgres did not have PITR. now they have build it, but Render's postgres offering is even more expensive than heroku, and queries run a bit slower on similar spec machines based on my test. I also don't like render charges per seat in addition to infra cost. [1] https://status.heroku.com/incidents/2413 https://status.heroku.com/incidents/2413
swader999 2y ago
It's really easy to be SOC2 compliant for a small SaaS on heroku. We need to grow in customers and Dev resources to pull it off on Raw AWS. Am looking for options though because heroku is increasing their prices.
teaearlgraycold 2y ago
I use render.com. Heroku is stuck in the past.
karmelapple 2y ago
We do, although we're in the middle of moving our entire Heroku Postgres spend over to Crunchy Data [1]. We were getting close to one of the big jumps on the standard pricing of Heroku Postgres, and we would have had to basically double our monthly cost to lift the max data we could store from 1.5TB to 2.0TB. On Crunchy Data, that additional disk space will be like 1% more rather than 100% more. While investigating Crunchy, I ran some benchmarks, and I found Crunchy Bridge Postgres to be running 3X faster than Heroku Postgres. Heroku seems to be working on some interesting new things, but I feel burned by the subpar performance and lack of basically any new features over many years. I don't know if the new Aurora-based database will be faster than Crunchy, but the benchmarks they're talking about sound like they're finally about to catch them. But we also have better features on Crunchy, too, such as logical replication. Logical replication is still not available on Heroku. The experience for deploying apps and having add-ons is still pretty easy, but we'll see how that improves. HTTP2 support is still in beta. 1. https://www.crunchydata.com https://www.crunchydata.com
- singingfish 2y ago
  +1 - recommend crunchy. I ran a substantial oracle to postgres project recently and crunchy were great.
- cyberax 2y ago
  I'm working in a new startup, and I tried several "easy" solutions: AWS Lightsail, Heroku, Crunchy. I settled up on AWS ECS :) My main issue with Heroku was that they have not changed anything in _years_. No support for gRPC, no IPv6, and simple VPC peering costs $1200 a month.
  - davepeck 2y ago
    Yeah, the lack of HTTP/2 support has been a long-standing issue with Heroku. They just shipped HTTP/2 terminated at their router [0], and have it on their roadmap [1] to support HTTP/2 all the way through. But it seems like it's at minimum a few months off. (As for VPC peering: the moment you need that, it sorta feels like Heroku is no longer the right place to be, even ignoring the costs.) [0] https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-http2-public-beta https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-http2-public-beta [1] https://github.com/orgs/heroku/projects/130 https://github.com/orgs/heroku/projects/130
cakoose 2y ago
A few years ago I was considering Heroku for something new. But then I learned that Heroku Postgres's HA offering used async replication, meaning you could lose minutes of writes in the event that the primary instance failed. That was a dealbreaker. That was very surprising to me. Most businesses that are willing to pay 2x for an HA database are probably NOT likely to be ok with that kind of data loss risk. (AWS and GCP's HA database offerings use synchronous replication.)
- hot_gril 2y ago
  Noticed this too. The master failover is marketed like a strict upgrade, and the "async" part is only in the fine print. Many would actually prefer the downtime over losing data. A user who's experienced with DBs should think to check on this, but still.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
WD-42 2y ago
VPS is dandy when the application is fresh. Once it starts getting long in the tooth and the VPS OS needs to be updated… nightmare fuel.
hot_gril 2y ago
Me. Haven't found anything that's just as easy to use. The supposed Heroku replacements like Fly.io weren't.
greenie_beans 2y ago
me. tried to move to render but it's been a headache for some key things that i need. my heroku setup is dialed in so it makes it a no brainer versus the time i've wasted trying to get render to fit my use case. right now i'm using both for two different services, and will consider moving off both once i get enough customers.
- anurag 2y ago
  What are you trying to do on Render? We have some stuff in the works and I'd love to find a way to help.
  - greenie_beans 2y ago
    Nothing sophisticated. My woes might be because I'm bad at devops. But I spent several hours fighting with a DNS change, trying to host my marketing website as Cloudflare pages site from my root domain (with DNS managed by Cloudflare), and then wildcard subdomains routed to a Render server. I couldn't get it to work no matter what configs I tried. My root domain marketing site is proxied through Cloudflare and I was trying to get the wildcard subdomains as DNS-only, and I suspect this was the problem but idk. In other words, the Cloudflare pages marketing site is https://bookhead.net https://bookhead.net and I wanted my customer's subdomains to route to the Render server like https://forlornbooks.bookhead.net/ https://forlornbooks.bookhead.net/ (I still get the error since I haven't finished my migration to Heroku). The subdomains worked with no problem until I tried to setup a separate marketing site at the root domain. Also, I had a hard time setting up SSH with a containerized server. It was a weird DX that was a bit confusing to document so I can remember later. Can only imagine how confusing it might be if I ever have teammates. The Render CLI looks promising, though. These are only the most recent issues. Seems like y'all improved the headaches I ran into the time I tried.
bvirb 2y ago
10yo+ B2B SaaS company we're still on Heroku. I think the value prop is particularly good for B2B SaaS and probably less so for consumer products. Our margin per customer is so much higher than the infra cost it just never makes sense to spend money on devops instead of building features. That said it does feel a bit like a ghost town, I'm always happy to hear when someone is doing something over there.
toasterlovin 2y ago
I’ll just share our experience with Hetzner from earlier this week to spare everyone the learning experience. Their prices are indeed incredible. However, we spun up a VPS in their Hillsboro, OR data center only to find out that our IP address was blocked by Cloud Flare, so there was no way for us to connect to our error logging or transactional email providers. We also found this thread indicating that their entire IP range for that DC is widely blocked[0]. So, not really acceptable for professional use, IMO, unless you just need compute. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39638849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39638849
- sammy2255 2y ago
  Cloudflare doesn’t block any ip addresses. Its their customers that do
  - toasterlovin 2y ago
    So in that case both Mailgun and Sentry were blocking our IP. When we googled the error message, it appeared to be a Cloud Flare message of some kind. But anyway, wouldn’t touch them with a ten foot pole for anything web related.
sammy2255 2y ago
Hetzner doesnt offer any SLAs which is important for some people
devoutsalsa 2y ago
Then you have to manage a VPS. If you want to do ops, you’re not Heroku’s target customer.

Genuine question, who even uses Heroku anymore? A VPS (hetzner, etc) + managed postgres DB (supabase / AWS / etc) or a local one might more more than enough these days.

Andugal 2y ago

For a lot of use cases, nothing beats « git push » and tada your app is deployed.

zdragnar 2y ago
Very easy to do with GitHub actions or the equivalent in gitlab and probably other competitors by now I imagine. If you wanted to spend money on something else, circleci and others help manage ci/cd as well.
- icedchai 2y ago
  Not to mention every cloud provider has something built in (AWS CodeBuild, GCP Cloud Build, etc.)
csjh 2y ago
That’s a pretty standard feature nowadays

risyachka 2y ago

probably those who don't want to set uptime alerts, fine-tune configs, set up backups and restores (which are essential because sooner rather later someone always deletes a few rows/tables) and want to focus on business

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

davepeck 2y ago

I do, as do several startups I advise. Despite interesting competition, my feeling is that the Heroku of 2024 remains... Heroku. I feel this way even though -- depending on how you segment -- the list of "interesting" competitors is quite long at this point: Render, Railway, Northflank, Fly.io, Vercel, DO App Platform, etc.

fellowniusmonk 2y ago
I revisit heroku alts every ~6months and I am shocked how not ergonomic they still are, I switched to DO VPS + Ansible Container & Github Actions for any project that doesn't need infinite scale after Salesforce paused heroku development but I'd go back to literally any heroku clone. It's crazy how the ergonomic still just aren't there.
- davepeck 2y ago
  Yes, completely agree; I'm equally surprised by the poor DXes. (And: bugs. I'm also surprised by the kinds of issues I run into on some of those sites in my list -- problems that, even if not show-stopping, feel like revealing indicators of quality.)
  - MuffinFlavored 2y ago
    > Yes, completely agree; I'm equally surprised by the poor DXes. Any specifics/examples? I find it hard to imagine those "big name" companies/platforms you just mentioned don't have entire teams dedicated to hyper-optimizing experience.
    - vasco 2y ago
      Having a dedicated team doesn't mean anything about the end result.
strix_varius 2y ago
IME the Heroku of 2024 is Render.
- yangcheng 2y ago
  Can you elaborate a bit more why render is good? we are on heroku and I have evaluated alternatives every 6 months since heroku/github outage 2 years ago [1]. But I don't see how render is better. 2 years ago render postgres did not have PITR. now they have build it, but Render's postgres offering is even more expensive than heroku, and queries run a bit slower on similar spec machines based on my test. I also don't like render charges per seat in addition to infra cost. [1] https://status.heroku.com/incidents/2413 https://status.heroku.com/incidents/2413

swader999 2y ago

It's really easy to be SOC2 compliant for a small SaaS on heroku. We need to grow in customers and Dev resources to pull it off on Raw AWS. Am looking for options though because heroku is increasing their prices.

teaearlgraycold 2y ago

I use render.com. Heroku is stuck in the past.

karmelapple 2y ago

We do, although we're in the middle of moving our entire Heroku Postgres spend over to Crunchy Data [1]. We were getting close to one of the big jumps on the standard pricing of Heroku Postgres, and we would have had to basically double our monthly cost to lift the max data we could store from 1.5TB to 2.0TB. On Crunchy Data, that additional disk space will be like 1% more rather than 100% more. While investigating Crunchy, I ran some benchmarks, and I found Crunchy Bridge Postgres to be running 3X faster than Heroku Postgres. Heroku seems to be working on some interesting new things, but I feel burned by the subpar performance and lack of basically any new features over many years. I don't know if the new Aurora-based database will be faster than Crunchy, but the benchmarks they're talking about sound like they're finally about to catch them. But we also have better features on Crunchy, too, such as logical replication. Logical replication is still not available on Heroku. The experience for deploying apps and having add-ons is still pretty easy, but we'll see how that improves. HTTP2 support is still in beta. 1. https://www.crunchydata.com https://www.crunchydata.com

singingfish 2y ago
+1 - recommend crunchy. I ran a substantial oracle to postgres project recently and crunchy were great.
cyberax 2y ago
I'm working in a new startup, and I tried several "easy" solutions: AWS Lightsail, Heroku, Crunchy. I settled up on AWS ECS :) My main issue with Heroku was that they have not changed anything in _years_. No support for gRPC, no IPv6, and simple VPC peering costs $1200 a month.
- davepeck 2y ago
  Yeah, the lack of HTTP/2 support has been a long-standing issue with Heroku. They just shipped HTTP/2 terminated at their router [0], and have it on their roadmap [1] to support HTTP/2 all the way through. But it seems like it's at minimum a few months off. (As for VPC peering: the moment you need that, it sorta feels like Heroku is no longer the right place to be, even ignoring the costs.) [0] https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-http2-public-beta https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-http2-public-beta [1] https://github.com/orgs/heroku/projects/130 https://github.com/orgs/heroku/projects/130

cakoose 2y ago

A few years ago I was considering Heroku for something new. But then I learned that Heroku Postgres's HA offering used async replication, meaning you could lose minutes of writes in the event that the primary instance failed. That was a dealbreaker. That was very surprising to me. Most businesses that are willing to pay 2x for an HA database are probably NOT likely to be ok with that kind of data loss risk. (AWS and GCP's HA database offerings use synchronous replication.)

hot_gril 2y ago
Noticed this too. The master failover is marketed like a strict upgrade, and the "async" part is only in the fine print. Many would actually prefer the downtime over losing data. A user who's experienced with DBs should think to check on this, but still.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

WD-42 2y ago

VPS is dandy when the application is fresh. Once it starts getting long in the tooth and the VPS OS needs to be updated… nightmare fuel.

hot_gril 2y ago

Me. Haven't found anything that's just as easy to use. The supposed Heroku replacements like Fly.io weren't.

greenie_beans 2y ago

me. tried to move to render but it's been a headache for some key things that i need. my heroku setup is dialed in so it makes it a no brainer versus the time i've wasted trying to get render to fit my use case. right now i'm using both for two different services, and will consider moving off both once i get enough customers.

anurag 2y ago
What are you trying to do on Render? We have some stuff in the works and I'd love to find a way to help.
- greenie_beans 2y ago
  Nothing sophisticated. My woes might be because I'm bad at devops. But I spent several hours fighting with a DNS change, trying to host my marketing website as Cloudflare pages site from my root domain (with DNS managed by Cloudflare), and then wildcard subdomains routed to a Render server. I couldn't get it to work no matter what configs I tried. My root domain marketing site is proxied through Cloudflare and I was trying to get the wildcard subdomains as DNS-only, and I suspect this was the problem but idk. In other words, the Cloudflare pages marketing site is https://bookhead.net https://bookhead.net and I wanted my customer's subdomains to route to the Render server like https://forlornbooks.bookhead.net/ https://forlornbooks.bookhead.net/ (I still get the error since I haven't finished my migration to Heroku). The subdomains worked with no problem until I tried to setup a separate marketing site at the root domain. Also, I had a hard time setting up SSH with a containerized server. It was a weird DX that was a bit confusing to document so I can remember later. Can only imagine how confusing it might be if I ever have teammates. The Render CLI looks promising, though. These are only the most recent issues. Seems like y'all improved the headaches I ran into the time I tried.

bvirb 2y ago

10yo+ B2B SaaS company we're still on Heroku. I think the value prop is particularly good for B2B SaaS and probably less so for consumer products. Our margin per customer is so much higher than the infra cost it just never makes sense to spend money on devops instead of building features. That said it does feel a bit like a ghost town, I'm always happy to hear when someone is doing something over there.

toasterlovin 2y ago

I’ll just share our experience with Hetzner from earlier this week to spare everyone the learning experience. Their prices are indeed incredible. However, we spun up a VPS in their Hillsboro, OR data center only to find out that our IP address was blocked by Cloud Flare, so there was no way for us to connect to our error logging or transactional email providers. We also found this thread indicating that their entire IP range for that DC is widely blocked[0]. So, not really acceptable for professional use, IMO, unless you just need compute. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39638849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39638849

sammy2255 2y ago
Cloudflare doesn’t block any ip addresses. Its their customers that do
- toasterlovin 2y ago
  So in that case both Mailgun and Sentry were blocking our IP. When we googled the error message, it appeared to be a Cloud Flare message of some kind. But anyway, wouldn’t touch them with a ten foot pole for anything web related.

sammy2255 2y ago

Hetzner doesnt offer any SLAs which is important for some people

devoutsalsa 2y ago

Then you have to manage a VPS. If you want to do ops, you’re not Heroku’s target customer.