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Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

blog.jalada.co.uk

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Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#31

Post by shostack »

carise wrote: post #13
eatitraw wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm wondering if there are any recommendations for "Heroku-like" providers with a free tier that stays up 24/7 for super simple Rails and Sinatra apps, perhaps with a DB. OpenShift( https://www.openshift.com/ ) may be the service you're looking for. I haven't tried it, but it looks nice.

I've used OpenShift and it's pretty straightforward to use. I don't feel like it's as easy to use as Heroku, but it got the job done. If I left my app idle (I think for 24 hrs or more), I noticed that it took awhile for it to awake when I tried to access it again.

So is it not in fact up for 24hrs if it has to wake up when you try to access it again?

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#32

Post by jalada »

glogla wrote: post #29

The author writes about spinning virtual machine from Linode. 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 li…

Nice! Great suggestion :)

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#33

Post by smithclay »

glogla wrote: post #29

The author writes about spinning virtual machine from Linode. 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 li…

For many kinds of tiny one-off hobbyist projects, why bother with servers or dynos at all?

Couldn't help but wonder if the (valid) cost and performance problems the author has with heroku will end up pushing devs faster to Backend-as-a-Service platforms like Parse, Firebase, or something like Amazon Mobile Hub (Lambda on Rails?).

(Note: not affiliated with any of these platforms, etc. Just a lazy mobile developer with lots of things that never make it to the app store.)

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#34

Post by bduerst »

m_fayer wrote: post #21
TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #6

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.

It used to be pretty terrible for python. You couldn't use third party libraries that had C dependencies (e.g. Pandas). Now with docker images you can at least define your instances.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#35

Post by [deleted] »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #30

Not to be rude, but these complaints, minus the "increase" are standard Heroku practice. I see no changes-- in fact, what has changed there, anything? 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 o…

[deleted]

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#36

Post by iza »

shostack wrote: post #31
carise wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used OpenShift and it's pretty straightforward to use. I don't feel like it's as easy to use as Heroku, but it got the job done. If I left my app idle (I think for 24 hrs or more), I noticed that it took awhile for it to awake when I tried to access it again.

So is it not in fact up for 24hrs if it has to wake up when you try to access it again?

According to https://www.openshift.com/products/pricing/plan-comparison the free plan idles after 24 hours of inactivity (https://developers.openshift.com/en/managing-idling.html)

However you can work around it by hitting your server with an http request every 24 hours, or upgrade to the Bronze Plan which apparently has $0 base price anyway so I'm not sure what the downside is.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#37

Post by sotojuan »

PascalW wrote: post #19

Heroku indeed used to be very generous. I totally get why they are making these changes, it's hard to sustain this in the long run. That said; for hobby stuff I've switched to a cheap VPS plus Dokku [0] and haven't looked back. Works with Heroku buildpacks and even runs custom Dockerfiles if you need anything fancy. Hardly requires any maintenance. There's a couple of alternatives like Deis [1] and Flynn [2] that off…

Dokku + a $5 or $10 Digital Ocean droplet is a great combo.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#38

Post by programminggeek »

smt88 wrote: post #14
toomuchtodo wrote: post #2

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.

No, they wouldn't. They've run the numbers. What they figured out is the cost to acquire a paid user is cheaper by having a free account than by buying a bunch of ads.

Free plans or hobbyist plans are really there to get the marketing and cheap customer acquisition, not to power the mainline B2B business. The main business in both cases is likely bolstered by enterprise clients worth 5+ figures a year, but don't likely cost much more than a hobbyist account to maintain.

If you only had a hobbyist offering, you'd go out of business. As this post points out, Heroku has a much larger common offering where they should have plenty of profit at scale.

Meanwhile, they also benefit from hobbyists saying "oh yeah, Heroku is easy, let's use that!"

Heroku is smart, they know what they are doing.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#39

Post by pickle27 »

jonwayne wrote: post #15
pickle27 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree - do they still lock you to their db? if they do then you are going to have to do a lot of work if you want to move to a different platform

Absolutely not. You can use Cloud Datastore, or you can connect to any database that can communicate over sockets or http, including Cloud SQL. Of note is that Datastore has a free tier, Cloud SQL does not, and Socket usage can incur (some) cost when communicating with other databases. I've seen many Python apps that connect to a free MongoDB instance hosted on Mongolab. (also worth noting that Node.js support for Ap…

cool I didn't know that - thanks for the info!

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#40

Post by ufmace »

I can certainly see the point where Heroku comes out wildly overpriced for certain types of hobby-scale apps. I've seen several people recommend dedicated servers via Linode or DigitalOcean instead, which has it's own pluses and minuses - gotta maintain the server, but for a pretty low price, you get something powerful enough to run a 24/7 server + database + whatever other odds and ends your app needs, as long as the demands aren't too high.

I'm wondering how AWS compares, though - running a dedicated, manually managed EC2 instance or ElasticBeanstalk. Seems like you could get your own server, and still have little barrier to scaling as high as anybody could ever need at the touch of a button. Anybody have much insight on that?

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