Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Best alternative to Heroku?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 63 posts

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Heroku?

#41

Post by rrrodrigo »

michalkw wrote: post #39

The one hosting I'd recommend is of course Shelly Cloud: https://shellycloud.com/ I'm a co-founder and I can tell you we have everything you asked for: - Super easy deployment. Just as in Heroku you just do a git push and we take care of the rest. We also offer integrated setup for databases and file storage, so deployment of Ruby applications is even more streamlined than on Heroku. - Super easy maintenance. We take…

+1 for that, I've been using Shellycloud for almost a year now and the support has been great

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Heroku?

#42

Post by futhey »

kevink245 wrote: post #23

Setup a centOS server with rackspace and use badger-rails to deploy with same workflow at Heroku. badger-rails takes a fresh centOS server and installed all dependencies for ruby and rails. Low-stress. https://github.com/curiousminds/badger-rails

BYOB - Best of all worlds

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Heroku?

#44

Post by bluedino »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #15

In my experience Dotcloud has the advantage of giving you more control over your instances and the ability to SSH into them. But I had issues with the reliability of deployment there. I used to love the sandbox, but I dropped Dotcloud as a provider after that was removed without a drop-in replacement. However, I still use them to serve Redis, and so far, it's way cheaper than using a dedicated Redis service. I looked…

> giving you more control over your instances and the ability to SSH into them.

I thought the point of Heroku was not having to SSH into your servers?

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Heroku?

#45

Post by jguimont »

edouard1234567 wrote: post #9
[deleted] wrote: post #2

[deleted]

Just checked them out correct me if I'm wrong but they seem more like an alternative to rackspace or EC2. They provide a VM while heroku provides the full preconfigured application and deployment stack.

cloud66 provides the full deployment stack on EC2, rackspace, digitalocean and others. You can deploy any git repo and it will analyse the code and configure the ruby app based on the gemfile (postgres, memcache, redis, etc) and install it.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Heroku?

#46

Post by ericcholis »

tszming wrote: post #8

We are using AWS Elastic Beanstalk for Java and quite satisfied for the ease of use, and they also support Ruby now: http://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/ The best thing about AWS Elastic Beanstalk is you can still login into the machine in case you need to troubleshoot for some low level stuffs.

I evaluated Elastic Beanstalk for PHP about a year ago. I was impressed with the features I had at my finger tips. But, I couldn't get my custom PHP AMI to work the way I wanted (likely due to my own errors). So, I opted for another solution.

I'd like to think that Elastic Beanstalk is Amazon's answer to Heroku

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Heroku?

#47

Post by WillieBKevin »

grrrando wrote: post #19

I've had a good time working with Blue Box Group ( https://bluebox.net/ ). I've been using them as a backup for an uptime-critical festival application that runs on Heroku. They helped me by setting up a Capistrano script for me that I run alongside my Heroku pushes. They set up the entire stack according to a specification I talked them through. And they helped me write a script to keep my backup DB in line with my…

I second the vote for Blue Box. We moved from Heroku 8 months ago and have been extremely happy.

I agree with grrrando, there were a few instances of slow responses during setup, but I also agree thats because you're talking to an individual in that case, rather than a support team.

Two of my favorite things about Blue Box: 1) On the first sales call they had a knowledgeable engineer that discussed the specifics of our app. 2) With their online chat I get answers from an engineer within minutes, even on nights or weekends (they have phone support too, I prefer chat)

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Heroku?

#48

Post by jedc »

I've really enjoyed building on Google App Engine. (Disclaimer; I work for Google, but not in engineering)

You can use the Datastore for NoSQL data, or connect with CloudSQL if you want to use a traditional MySQL database. It's quite forgiving when it comes to mistakes; and GAE will automatically spin up new instances as traffic warrants. (No need to manually add/remove dynos).

I know people have had problems with support, but at the same point I understand that if you pay the ($500/year?) for Premium support that the team is really responsive.

For me, as a very novice developer, I had enough on my plate building my app. It was nice to leave ALL of the sysadmin work to App Engine...

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Heroku?

#49

Post by opdemand »

You should check out OpDemand's EC2-based Ruby on Rails stack. Workflow is also very similar to Heroku (one click deploys, or `opdemand deploy`) but you run it off your own AWS account:

http://www.opdemand.com/docs/ruby-on-rails-quick-start-guide...

The stack automatically provisions, monitors and maintains an ELB, EC2 Instance(s), RDS and all the networking and key pair infrastructure you need. Most Heroku apps don't even need to be modified due to OpDemand's use Procfiles and standard dependency management. Deployment automation is all open-source Puppet hosted on GitHub.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Heroku?

#50

Post by acjohnson55 »

pearkes wrote: post #17
acjohnson55 wrote: post #15

In my experience Dotcloud has the advantage of giving you more control over your instances and the ability to SSH into them. But I had issues with the reliability of deployment there. I used to love the sandbox, but I dropped Dotcloud as a provider after that was removed without a drop-in replacement. However, I still use them to serve Redis, and so far, it's way cheaper than using a dedicated Redis service. I looked…

> giving you more control over your instances and the ability to SSH into them. FWIW you can do: heroku run bash Which let's you mess around on a new dyno (not an existing one).

That's good for things that change shared state, but you can't do anything that would alter a running dyno or interrogate its state, unless you built your own hooks or something. But building something like that would kind of obviate the perks of a NoOps system.
Post reply on HN