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Is it me or when there is talk about a "personal Heroku" the only thing that seems to be there is a git push deployment? Heroku is much more than that from the

Is it me or when there is talk about a "personal Heroku" the only thing that seems to be there is a git push deployment? Heroku is much more than that from the deployment to the logging, to the collaboration. What about DB or all the other external systems a modern web app needs (memcache, redis, etc)? We build custom apps for many different clients which each have their own server/db. Heroku is costly for that kind of setup, but I haven't found anything else that gives me the same peace of mind and sunny weekends.

driverdan 12y ago
> Heroku is costly for that kind of setup, but I haven't found anything else that gives me the same peace of mind and sunny weekends. If it's costing you enough that you can hire someone to do devops then do just that, hire someone. If not then you're actually saving money vs the cost of the employee.
agilebyte 12y ago
We have been trying to use a similar setup and the pain point was getting DB wired up properly. Dokku has plugins for different databases, but when a server unexpectedly shuts down, it is a pain to restore the wiring and all the data to the original state.
- jguimont 12y ago
  My exact same experience. I do not evaluate a system with the happy path. You can run a blog, but when you run an entreprise app, there is no room for downtime.
jonahx 12y ago
I feel the same. I love the ease of Heroku but the premium cost is high. Given the fierce price competition among VPS providers like digitalocean, I've always wondered why there are no cheaper alternatives to heroku. Is their infrastructure just that hard to duplicate?
- Igglyboo 12y ago
  For what I'm using digitalocean for, it is only $5ish dollars a month more than heroku but infinitely easier to use as it's an actual linux box I have free reign over. I understand I'm not going to make either of them a lot of money but I can't imagine wanting to save money and deal with heroku when a VPS is so cheap now a days.
  - adamnemecek 12y ago
    So how much money do you lose if your server goes down? The grandparent comment is saying that Heroku is more expensive than VPS, not vice versa.
- ilaksh 12y ago
  Dokku has most of the key features of Heroku for free and even deploys the same buildpacks.
- bryanwbh 12y ago
  Check out Openshift (https://www.openshift.com https://www.openshift.com), I am currently using the free tier to host static blogs and static sites; quite frankly, it's not bad
- techdragon 12y ago
  Because building one is non trivial. It deters competitors from attempting it.
maccman 12y ago
It's absolutely true that Heroku is a lot more than what Dokku, Docker & Vagrant provide, especially when it comes to auto-scaling. Heroku is a good choice for many - but it's also good to have alternatives. For us (at Clearbit), it made sense to build our own infrastructure for cost reasons, especially since we're using EC2's spot instances. To your points though: * Dokku uses Heroku's buildpacks and auto-detects your stack when you git push * Dokku-alt supports collaboration & user-permissions * Logging is automatically handled (dokku logs app-name) * Support for Memcache/Redis is baked in (dokku redis:create app-name) * Postgres is also supported by Dokku, but I personally go with AWS RDS.
- merlincorey 12y ago
  > For us (at Clearbit), it made sense to build our own infrastructure for cost reasons, especially since we're using EC2's spot instances. > * Postgres is also supported by Dokku, but I personally go with AWS RDS. That's funny - I've costed it, and it's cheaper to run equal sized instances of a DB node than to run RDS, plus you get way more control over the tuning and implementation of your database layer.
AznHisoka 12y ago
That's the sense I get too. I built my own personal Heroku with a cheap $40 OVH server, and my custom capistrano script. "cap deploy" is all I need to deploy everything, run database migrations, etc.

driverdan 12y ago

> Heroku is costly for that kind of setup, but I haven't found anything else that gives me the same peace of mind and sunny weekends. If it's costing you enough that you can hire someone to do devops then do just that, hire someone. If not then you're actually saving money vs the cost of the employee.

agilebyte 12y ago

We have been trying to use a similar setup and the pain point was getting DB wired up properly. Dokku has plugins for different databases, but when a server unexpectedly shuts down, it is a pain to restore the wiring and all the data to the original state.

jguimont 12y ago
My exact same experience. I do not evaluate a system with the happy path. You can run a blog, but when you run an entreprise app, there is no room for downtime.

jonahx 12y ago

I feel the same. I love the ease of Heroku but the premium cost is high. Given the fierce price competition among VPS providers like digitalocean, I've always wondered why there are no cheaper alternatives to heroku. Is their infrastructure just that hard to duplicate?

Igglyboo 12y ago
For what I'm using digitalocean for, it is only $5ish dollars a month more than heroku but infinitely easier to use as it's an actual linux box I have free reign over. I understand I'm not going to make either of them a lot of money but I can't imagine wanting to save money and deal with heroku when a VPS is so cheap now a days.
- adamnemecek 12y ago
  So how much money do you lose if your server goes down? The grandparent comment is saying that Heroku is more expensive than VPS, not vice versa.
ilaksh 12y ago
Dokku has most of the key features of Heroku for free and even deploys the same buildpacks.
bryanwbh 12y ago
Check out Openshift (https://www.openshift.com https://www.openshift.com), I am currently using the free tier to host static blogs and static sites; quite frankly, it's not bad
techdragon 12y ago
Because building one is non trivial. It deters competitors from attempting it.

maccman 12y ago

It's absolutely true that Heroku is a lot more than what Dokku, Docker & Vagrant provide, especially when it comes to auto-scaling. Heroku is a good choice for many - but it's also good to have alternatives. For us (at Clearbit), it made sense to build our own infrastructure for cost reasons, especially since we're using EC2's spot instances. To your points though: * Dokku uses Heroku's buildpacks and auto-detects your stack when you git push * Dokku-alt supports collaboration & user-permissions * Logging is automatically handled (dokku logs app-name) * Support for Memcache/Redis is baked in (dokku redis:create app-name) * Postgres is also supported by Dokku, but I personally go with AWS RDS.

merlincorey 12y ago
> For us (at Clearbit), it made sense to build our own infrastructure for cost reasons, especially since we're using EC2's spot instances. > * Postgres is also supported by Dokku, but I personally go with AWS RDS. That's funny - I've costed it, and it's cheaper to run equal sized instances of a DB node than to run RDS, plus you get way more control over the tuning and implementation of your database layer.

AznHisoka 12y ago

That's the sense I get too. I built my own personal Heroku with a cheap $40 OVH server, and my custom capistrano script. "cap deploy" is all I need to deploy everything, run database migrations, etc.