21–30 of 119 posts
Google AppEngine is a good alternative for Python, Go, Java, or PHP web apps.
While my instinctive reaction to Heroku's shift was "ugh, that sucks, how dare they," I have to say I get it. It is hard to build a successful business with that model given their offering. However to the comment about "git push heroku master," someone that is an "early" programmer like myself finds that level of simplification helpful when I'm focusing on things like learning all the other things that could go wrong…
AWS. Elastic Beanstalk has pretty similar easy command line tools, and their free tier gives enough for one instance each of ec2, s3, rds and will mostly autoconfigure like heroku does.
The benefit to me of using something like Heroku is not because I get more CPU/RAM than an equivalently priced Linode instance - the value is in not having to manage a Linode instance at all.
I'd also argue that git-pushing to Heroku is still a lot less friction than dealing with docker images or chef/puppet scripts.
While my instinctive reaction to Heroku's shift was "ugh, that sucks, how dare they," I have to say I get it. It is hard to build a successful business with that model given their offering. However to the comment about "git push heroku master," someone that is an "early" programmer like myself finds that level of simplification helpful when I'm focusing on things like learning all the other things that could go wrong…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AWS. Elastic Beanstalk has pretty similar easy command line tools, and their free tier gives enough for one instance each of ec2, s3, rds and will mostly autoconfigure like heroku does.
Since I'm not at all confident in my abilities to secure things properly yet, am I at any risk of racking up a massive bill from a hacked account if I go with the AWS free tier? Or is that simply not a possibility?
Hobbyists rarely pay the bills. Go upmarket or suffer in perpetual purgatory.
I imagine MailChimp, WP Engine, and some other services would disagree. It's possible to have a plan that suits hobbyists while still being profitable. In this case, as a PaaS, Heroku may not have been able to offer something like that, but it's not universally true that hobbyists are unprofitable.
Google AppEngine is a good alternative for Python, Go, Java, or PHP web apps.
As a longstanding gae user I have to disagree. The performance characteristics are esoteric, they're always a few generations behind wrt language updates and framework compatibility, and the whole platform is stagnating. At least in Java-land, and I think Python too.
(disclaimer: I work for Google on Cloud Platform, but not on anything Java related)
There's one cool alternative I found: Hetzner Online[1] leases dedicated hardware that their other customers stopped using or ordered but didn't use, etc. It is in form of reverse auction - unused hardware gets cheaper until someone rents it.
You can get i7-3770 server with 2x3 TB disks and 16 GB RAM for 32 EUR per month. That's not much more money than linode, but it is much beefier and just your (but no SSD). If you pay more you can get something like i7-3770 with 32 GB RAM, 2x3 TB disks and 2x240 GB SSD for 65 EUR a month.
The servers are in Germany, which might be interesting for Europeans who are wary of US cloud companies.
I'm not affiliated with them in any way, I just find their offer cool.
They're finally too expensive for you, or you outgrew them? They aren't cheap, and never have been, especially for hobbyists.
If you have a hobby, you most likely have more time than money to complete your hobby, so why, why use something like Heroku? The very nature of your activity is to spend your time, not your money, Heroku is only giving you the feeling of savings until you outgrow their nearly worthless free offering. Now you have to spend your time, moving, configuring, and learning an "entirely new" system. Had you done this the first time, you'd have saved money/time.
Yeah... "git push" to deploy is easy[1]-- and if you're new to application development it can be nice, but! It also means you have no idea how to configure or run your app (i.e. deploy). It means you're more vulnerable to your vendors quarterly earnings needs (price hikes), it means you're more vulnerable to vendor technology changes (lock-in), it also means if it ever hits the fan-- you're gonna have oodles of downtime while you learn how to do it "right" the first (nth) time.
FWIW, it's actually really easy to run a VPS that's stable once you learn how to do it properly. Don't fear it, mate. I've always found it nice since none of my projects ever get substantial traffic, I can usually run some auxiliary service I need (like Gitlab) on it too. A two for one, eh?
... One last thing, if you're running a business Heroku might be the right choice (it's up to you to evaluate the risk/reward).
[1] I personally think deploying with Capistrano is a cinch (cap deploy) but it'll take you a lil' bit of effort to set up the first time.