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Personally, for the reduction in admin tasks (which I think people greatly underestimate), improved deploys and rollbacks, and improved uptime about $50 a month is completely worth it compared to a standard server.
I don't know why the monthly bill in the article is $250 though.
brilliant read, one thing I'd modify is ask some/all these questions on signup or login. Tweak enough questions and techniques to ask [0] so as not to discourage. This way you can gain more info as as people use/try/login.
[0] Must be numerous ways to gain info building it into actions of tool.
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How scalable does a simple checklist app need to be? Especially when that checklist app has next to no users? I just don't think that managing your own SSL cert and backups are worth $250 a month for a tiny application that no one uses. Logging into your VPS once a month to install updates is beyond trivial. That might not be my strategy if I had hundreds of paying customers, but the author of the article didn't have…
Agree with brandon272. $250/mo is not a viable business plan. As much as I'd like to say my time is more valuable, honestly I'd rather save my $250/mo and built out a solution that's cheaper. For the naysayers, my relatively small apps receive over 300k reqs/day and it's hosted on a much, much cheaper infrastructure. Just remember to cache things where appropriate and you'd be surprised how much $30-40 in server cost…
He'd only have needed, say, 10 paying customers to cover his expensive hosting. The fact he couldn't get those first 10 customers is why he failed, not the hosting costs.
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I'd argue the barrier is just as high. I taught a ten week course in back end development and I think the students would have done equally well deploying on a VPS or Heroku. The curriculum called for using Heroku but I regret following it now. Heroku bills itself as being easy for a beginner but go ahead and try to deploy any simple Rails or Node project using their guides. Half the time something goes wrong. Either…
Many pet projects you can run for Free on Heroku. Their docs are pretty straight forward, not sure what your hiccups were but I've deployed quite a few sites to Heroku without much if any issues. The asset pipeline in rails use to cause some issues but I think that has all been resolved with the 12 factor gem. Also setting up a VPS is in no way easier than Heroku. You have to install nginx, ruby, mysql etc. Then you…
That's not the "right way" but arguably nor is using a Heroku box with no idea what's actually running on it.
Dude! $250 doesn't make any sense. I've been running a MUCH more complex side project in Heroku with ~80k visitors per week for way, way below that, closer to what you would pay with DigitalOcean or the like. For a checklist app and your traffic you shouldn't need the dynos or the database upgrade.
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> Zero-day security issues? They're handled by a managed server host. All kernel level updates are. And that is how much per month? A quick check with a well known company shows £350/mo. That sounds expensive, but on the other hand I'm not sure I would be leaving my security in hands of a $10/mo shop :)
Kernel updates really ought to be an automated process at any company. At that point it doesn't really matter if you have 3 servers going for $350 or 49 servers going for $50 a pop.
In other words, you don't pay them so much for what they do every day, but for what you don't really hope never happens.
I choked at seeing the $250/mo. Heroku cost for a checklist app! Wow. You can set up a Linode VM or DigitalOcean droplet for $5 or $10 a month, run a few commands to get software installed and get it reasonably hardened against intrusion. Hardly takes any time at all.
He loaded up too many things.
1 web dyno, the free Heroku Dev DB, SendGrid free starter plan, Google Analytics, and the SSL would run him about $27 ($20 for SSL and $7 for 1 paid Web Dyno so the app doesn't go down every 16 hours).
That's all he needs. $250/mo is OVERKILL that he doesn't need.
Pretty sure this is not a Heroku issue.
P.S. As others have pointed out, this is a simple checklist app. He doesn't even need the SSL add-on until he verifies this is something people will pay for. It's not that serious bro. People can login with their personal info over a normal HTTP connection for now.
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Agree with brandon272. $250/mo is not a viable business plan. As much as I'd like to say my time is more valuable, honestly I'd rather save my $250/mo and built out a solution that's cheaper. For the naysayers, my relatively small apps receive over 300k reqs/day and it's hosted on a much, much cheaper infrastructure. Just remember to cache things where appropriate and you'd be surprised how much $30-40 in server cost…
What sort of infrastructure?