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

Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

blog.jalada.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–119 of 119 posts

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#111

Post by jonwayne »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #63
jonwayne wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> also worth noting that Node.js support for App Engine is currently in beta. Is this public? I have been waiting to hear this for ages! Great News. I am planning a switch to node simply so I can run the same code on the front and back end. I was not looking forward to learning how to administer a server.

Check out https://cloud.google.com/nodejs

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#112

Post by jonwayne »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #68
jonwayne wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh, do you mean as a managed VM?

Yes.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#113

Post by ByatchMatch »

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…

Exactly. I found a similar configuration for 26eur a month on their server bidding platform. Besides smaller projects and demo/staging instances for clients I get almost 3Tb of "cloud storage" by running owncloud for the price. Even when I payed double for the same hardware I couldn't understand the appeal of heroku. Setting up a web and database server as well as stuff like redis and message queues is not some arcane art. Plus it's much easier to troubleshoot performance problems when you have full control over the environment.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#114

Post by ByatchMatch »

BlackMonday wrote: post #65
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…

Was Hetzner not the company that stored the customers password in plaintext a few years back? Since I am not entirely sure on this please correct me if I am wrong. But the prices are nice, thanks for posting this. Would love to use dedicated hardware but suspect that i am too dumb to secure my box good enough and end up in a botnet or as a spam server.

I've been using them for 5 years and never heard of this. They did start to offer 2 step auth recently.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#115

Post by joeevans1000 »

I just found I was being charged by Heroku for a service I never used for 8 months. I emailed them, and they offered me half off this month's bill, and nothing in for the past charges. Granted, I should have been more aware, but I've found Amazon to be extremely forgiving of my mistakes, crediting me for quite a bit of the charges for the few I've made. Given that I didn't actually touch my Heroku account, I actually feel they could have been more helpful. I say this because the big fear of cloud services is that you'll rack up charges you didn't mean to. I think a forgiving attitude for true mistakes is just good business. I'm not interested in Heroku from here on, as a result.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#116

Post by pvh »

Harkins wrote: post #108

Does anyone have screenshots of the database upgrade that the Heroku CLI is pushing? It gave me some technical-sounding warnings about needing to update my database, sounding a lot like the infrequent app stack updates (from Bamboo to Cedar or whatever). It walked me through an upgrade process, bounced app, everything happy. Then the bill came, and they'd added a $50/mo db to my $9/db. Support was shocked, shocked th…

Hi there - can you email me at pvh (at) heroku with a link to the ticket where you had a bad experience? This sounds like a bad UX bug that we need to fix, and I will make sure any unintended charges are taken care of.

I've also asked the PM for this project to look into what happened here and alerted the head of our support team. I hope you'll consider giving us a chance to make this right for you and a chance to re-earn your trust.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#117

Post by joshmn »

kasia66 wrote: post #110
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…

Cloud 66 provides a full stack container management as a service in production. It gives you the flexibility by offering Heroku-like functionality on your own server or on any cloud provider (AWS, DigitalOcean, Packet, Azure and etc). Cloud 66 gives you more control, helps to reduce the cost and to save time. go.c66.me/ktheroku (Disclaimer: I work at Cloud 66)

Did you ever read what I wrote, or did you just set up a Google Alert for Cloud66 and decide to push your "marketing link" with Cloud66?

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#118

Post by Harkins »

pvh wrote: post #116
Harkins wrote: post #108

Does anyone have screenshots of the database upgrade that the Heroku CLI is pushing? It gave me some technical-sounding warnings about needing to update my database, sounding a lot like the infrequent app stack updates (from Bamboo to Cedar or whatever). It walked me through an upgrade process, bounced app, everything happy. Then the bill came, and they'd added a $50/mo db to my $9/db. Support was shocked, shocked th…

Hi there - can you email me at pvh (at) heroku with a link to the ticket where you had a bad experience? This sounds like a bad UX bug that we need to fix, and I will make sure any unintended charges are taken care of. I've also asked the PM for this project to look into what happened here and alerted the head of our support team. I hope you'll consider giving us a chance to make this right for you and a chance to re…

I've now heard from two other people with the same experience: UI pushed a database upgrade, price was suddenly $50, support gave no help getting back to previous normal. Thank you for your email address, but no. The support ticket was a chance to regain my trust.

Any readers: I realize pulling large clients over a single small charge sounds like an overreaction, but client relationships are the health of a consultancy. $50 is a rounding error; partnering witha business willing to mislead for an upsell is an existential risk.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#119

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

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.

There are definitely some holes in GAE for Go too, but its not that bad.

Most of the pain points are in other areas. Like for example, the datastore API you have access to for Go doesn't even support geo-spatial data or queries. I had to hack my own solution. It made me pretty mad at the time, because how can you not support geospatial queries in a database in an age where mobile location-based apps are so ubiquitous.

So I can see why you would say the platform is stagnant. And there is probably some truth in what you are saying in terms of GAE not getting the same love as other parts of the Google Cloud.

But having said that, I STILL think there is some merit to building apps on GAE, if your app is a simple web server, or single purpose REST API. I have found that its pretty reliable, and its relatively cheap for what you get.

Post reply on HN