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This. Very much this. That said, I wouldn't trust lowendtalk.com too much if you want stability. If you are seriously contemplating a $300 budget, you can get

This. Very much this. That said, I wouldn't trust lowendtalk.com too much if you want stability. If you are seriously contemplating a $300 budget, you can get away with $60 on Linode or Digital Ocean and have much, much better stability compared to some of the providers there. If stability isn't a big issue for you [e.g. 95% uptime is okay] then you can go with those providers. That said, I wouldn't rely on a donationware model to bring in enough money unless it is less than $100. I know some sites that do function that way (mainly forums with strong communities) but generally they can't raise more than $100/mo reliably.

xur17 12y ago
I agree with the lowendtalk bit - I previously switched between 2 or 3 providers on lowendtalk, and I even had issues with one of the larger / more reputable ones on the site. Digital Ocean or Linode won't cost you that much more, and the stability will be worth it. I've been running a pretty popular site off of a $5 / month digital ocean box with no issues for over a year now. Does Heroku have this large of a markup generally, or is the op just overconfiguring?
- meowface 12y ago
  As far as I can tell, all of Heroku's plans beyond their free tier have quite a lot of markup.
- ProblemFactory 12y ago
  Heroku is expensive because of their markup, but more so because their platform forces everything to be separate managed, modular instances whose costs add up fast. * Want a web server instance that doesn't get shut down between requests? Then get at least 2 web dynos at $35/month each. * Want to run background jobs that are longer than 30 seconds? Then get a separate worker dyno at $35/month. * Want a database with more than 10K (!) rows? That's at least $10/month. * Want a memcache? That's $15+/month. And so on. For a small to medium popularity site, all of these could be combined into one VPS on traditional cloud hosting. Heroku would make sense for a startup that has plenty of cash and limited developer resources (-> buy fully-managed-everything), and knows it will need to scale to tens or hundreds of servers to handle traffic very soon. But for most hobby webapps, a single VPS somewhere else will be 10x cheaper and good enough for a long, long while.
  - mattgibson 12y ago
    If you enable the free New Relic add on and turn on availability checking, then the pings it sends every 60 seconds keep the dynos from ever being shut down. Also, if you're using Rails, switching to Unicorn as the server allows 3-5 concurrent requests, so you can get quite a bit out of the one free dyno if you don't use the standard config.
  - rajivm 12y ago
    * minor correction to the above -- the first dyno is "free", so you only need to pay for one $35/month dyno to get 2 web dynos that don't get shut down
  - tempestn 12y ago
    Even beyond medium popularity (depending on the type of site of course), you can move from a VPS to a dedicated server and handle quite a bit of traffic before you would need to use multiple boxes. (At least with some basic sysadmin skills, like using nginx instead of apache, or at least switching apache to the worker or event mpm and configuring it appropriately.) The next step from there could be moving the database to a separate server. You can get quite a ways without even worrying about load balancing/proxying/mirroring/etc.

xur17 12y ago

I agree with the lowendtalk bit - I previously switched between 2 or 3 providers on lowendtalk, and I even had issues with one of the larger / more reputable ones on the site. Digital Ocean or Linode won't cost you that much more, and the stability will be worth it. I've been running a pretty popular site off of a $5 / month digital ocean box with no issues for over a year now. Does Heroku have this large of a markup generally, or is the op just overconfiguring?

meowface 12y ago
As far as I can tell, all of Heroku's plans beyond their free tier have quite a lot of markup.
ProblemFactory 12y ago
Heroku is expensive because of their markup, but more so because their platform forces everything to be separate managed, modular instances whose costs add up fast. * Want a web server instance that doesn't get shut down between requests? Then get at least 2 web dynos at $35/month each. * Want to run background jobs that are longer than 30 seconds? Then get a separate worker dyno at $35/month. * Want a database with more than 10K (!) rows? That's at least $10/month. * Want a memcache? That's $15+/month. And so on. For a small to medium popularity site, all of these could be combined into one VPS on traditional cloud hosting. Heroku would make sense for a startup that has plenty of cash and limited developer resources (-> buy fully-managed-everything), and knows it will need to scale to tens or hundreds of servers to handle traffic very soon. But for most hobby webapps, a single VPS somewhere else will be 10x cheaper and good enough for a long, long while.
- mattgibson 12y ago
  If you enable the free New Relic add on and turn on availability checking, then the pings it sends every 60 seconds keep the dynos from ever being shut down. Also, if you're using Rails, switching to Unicorn as the server allows 3-5 concurrent requests, so you can get quite a bit out of the one free dyno if you don't use the standard config.
- rajivm 12y ago
  * minor correction to the above -- the first dyno is "free", so you only need to pay for one $35/month dyno to get 2 web dynos that don't get shut down
- tempestn 12y ago
  Even beyond medium popularity (depending on the type of site of course), you can move from a VPS to a dedicated server and handle quite a bit of traffic before you would need to use multiple boxes. (At least with some basic sysadmin skills, like using nginx instead of apache, or at least switching apache to the worker or event mpm and configuring it appropriately.) The next step from there could be moving the database to a separate server. You can get quite a ways without even worrying about load balancing/proxying/mirroring/etc.