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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

#91

Post by jqm »

oso2k wrote: post #75

Lowendbox is your friend [0]. [0] http://lowendbox.com/

You do have to be careful though. VPS offering is a pretty easy business to get in, and there are no shortage of people operating out of the proverbial "parents basement".

I've had some weird stuff from cheap providers including being down for days with no response, sudden price increases and having them go out of business all the sudden. Even for hobby projects it sucks having to chase people around set everything back up. I have found a couple more bucks a month to deal with a larger company that's it for the long haul to be money well spent.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#92

Post by meepmorp »

lexcorvus wrote: post #48
savant wrote: post #18

A reasonable option for hobbyists is Dokku[1], a single-server heroku clone. I'm also pretty excited about Convox[2], and would definitely recommend that early adopters check it out. I get that people are frustrated with heroku's pricing, but at the end of the day I think that if your side project isn't worth the money you spend on it's hosting, maybe you should look into other side projects? If it's truly not a mone…

Correcting grammar and spelling errors—especially in public—is always a tough call: upon judging that an error is systematic and not a simple typo, do you help the writer avoid the error in perpetuity—even if it embarrasses them a little, and even if you'll probably get downvoted for being pedantic or offtopic? In this case, I've determined the downsides are worth the possibility of sparing the author a lifetime of e…

It's incredible what a complete ass you are.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#93

Post by joshmn »

savant wrote: post #85
joshmn wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For something small (assuming it is), you can get away using Unicorn as your Rails server (assuming Rails), you can spawn a worker inside your dyno using before_fork and #spawn. For SSL, you can use CloudFlare as your DNS and take advantage of their SSL feature. While not ideal, does it need to be ideal for a trivial, probably-not-super-high-functioning-hacky-app? There's always Cloud66 — which I've used to great suc…

Jesus $50 a month? How did you end up finding such a team?

Off-shore, non-dedicated, two pages a month, max 20 billed hours a month. Nothing spectacular. I mostly just need them to lock things down, no insane hadoop setups or anything like that.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#94

Post by beeboop »

brandur wrote: post #16

Regarding the fifth point on SSL, I agree, but I'd recommend investigating a combined Heroku and Cloudflare stack as I've described here: https://brandur.org/fragments/cloudflare-ssl You can stay on the free tier of Cloudflare and the hobby tier of Heroku and get full encryption on your custom domain (and without worrying about getting certs issued). This is how I run my more important hobby apps. And regarding the l…

Great to know, thanks for mentioning it.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#95

Post by mtmail »

lexcorvus wrote: post #48
savant wrote: post #18

A reasonable option for hobbyists is Dokku[1], a single-server heroku clone. I'm also pretty excited about Convox[2], and would definitely recommend that early adopters check it out. I get that people are frustrated with heroku's pricing, but at the end of the day I think that if your side project isn't worth the money you spend on it's hosting, maybe you should look into other side projects? If it's truly not a mone…

Correcting grammar and spelling errors—especially in public—is always a tough call: upon judging that an error is systematic and not a simple typo, do you help the writer avoid the error in perpetuity—even if it embarrasses them a little, and even if you'll probably get downvoted for being pedantic or offtopic? In this case, I've determined the downsides are worth the possibility of sparing the author a lifetime of e…

The author's email address is in his HN profile (one click away). If you truely wanted to help the author you could have done it in private. I agree with the other users who replied.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#96

Post by mark_l_watson »

shostack wrote: post #3

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…

INM Bluemix has a very generous free tier. You can run two or three low memory Sinatra apps for free. It is a cool system. I also line AWS and Microsoft Azure, depending on what I am doing.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#97

Post by smt88 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #27
smt88 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Marginal cost. For MailChimp, WP Engine, etc, their code is running regardless. Heroku and other PaaS providers have to commit real resources (RAM, CPU time) that have a much greater cost than running some free work through your existing data pipeline.

It doesn't seem to be a problem for Linode to give me the virtual hardware at a reasonable price. Why would Heroku's software on top of that virtual hardware cost so much more? Is their deployment/management software using that much extra resources?

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#98

Post by smt88 »

programminggeek wrote: post #38
smt88 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 like…

> If you only had a hobbyist offering, you'd go out of business

This just isn't true. To mention WP Engine again, they were hobbyist-only at first. You had to contact them specifically to require an enterprise-grade plan.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#99

Post by toomuchtodo »

smt88 wrote: post #97
toomuchtodo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marginal cost. For MailChimp, WP Engine, etc, their code is running regardless. Heroku and other PaaS providers have to commit real resources (RAM, CPU time) that have a much greater cost than running some free work through your existing data pipeline.

It doesn't seem to be a problem for Linode to give me the virtual hardware at a reasonable price. Why would Heroku's software on top of that virtual hardware cost so much more? Is their deployment/management software using that much extra resources?

Linode owns the underlying hardware. Heroku is renting it from AWS. When you own your resources, you have more control over your margins (traditionally).

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#100

Post by PascalW »

jamiepenney wrote: post #41
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…

How big is the VPS you're running it on? I've got a 1GB Digital Ocean box for my side projects already, wondering if I should just spin up another one of those with Dokku instead.

I'm running it on 2GB but it really depends on your apps how much memory you'll need.

Dokku itself has no running processes, it's just Docker and nginx which are both pretty light on resources.

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