How is it different from Heroku? I'm and I think majority of the market in this segment is deeply invested in Heroku. How's it different?
DigitalOcean App Platform
101–110 of 357 posts
Re: DigitalOcean App Platform
#102We've been happy https://render.com customers for over a year now and on the surface this looks very similar. I'm glad to see another company take a stab at iterating on Heroku while keeping ops burden low. I'm interested to know - what's the sales pitch for DO over Render? I'm noticing some pricing differences but at first glance it seems they tip Render's direction. I'm also noticing Render is a bit further along (…
Does Render run on AWS? Or it's own servers? Having a little trouble figuring out things like that and what regions they're in etc. Looks cool though.
Re: DigitalOcean App Platform
#103Is it just me, or is $15/mo for the cheapest Postgres-with-backups a bit steep? Heroku's free DBs (or $9/mo basic plan) support daily backups. I've currently got a web app I'm just self-hosting on a DO VPS for $5/month. I have a Postgres DB on the same VPS (via a Docker image), with a 10-line shell script & cron job for backups to Backblaze B2 (which costs ~nothing/month for my tiny DB). Additionally, my web app is a…
If you're going to do this yourself, Caprover is the best.
Cram it into that $5/month, bump the swap to 2GB and then deploy your DB into it... backups are supported if you just straight up map a persistent volume out to your B2 (https://github.com/caprover/caprover/issues/410)
Edit: Be aware during automated upgrades you will trip CPU alarms.
Re: DigitalOcean App Platform
#104Like all DigitalOcean products, the App Platform provides predictable, easy-to-understand pricing that allows you to control costs to prevent surprise bills. I can't see any features listed that enable me to control costs to prevent surprise bills. If a site got submitted to HN and hugged to not-to-death-because-it-autoscales then I'd wake up to a bunch of alerts and massive outbound bandwidth bill. I don't want that…
This is laughable - billing is logically separated from droplet use, so unlike other providers DO charges for the potential to use a capability, rather than actual use, regardless of whether it is consumed. I got stung badly by this - charged for X droplets capability when zero droplets capability was being used for several months. Explained the misunderstanding to DO, got no sympathy & no refund. Won't touch them ag…
This is what makes "the cloud" profitable.
If your droplet isn't using all of it's resources (CPU, RAM, DISK), they are able to oversell their capacity.
Re: DigitalOcean App Platform
#105How is it different from Heroku? I'm and I think majority of the market in this segment is deeply invested in Heroku. How's it different?
It seems like their pitch is that it's a bit cheaper. Although it doesn't have most of the features Heroku has... nowadays they have some pretty great stuff, like a managed Postgres database connected to Kafka.
Re: DigitalOcean App Platform
#106Like all DigitalOcean products, the App Platform provides predictable, easy-to-understand pricing that allows you to control costs to prevent surprise bills. I can't see any features listed that enable me to control costs to prevent surprise bills. If a site got submitted to HN and hugged to not-to-death-because-it-autoscales then I'd wake up to a bunch of alerts and massive outbound bandwidth bill. I don't want that…
That seems somewhat opposite to the point of PaaS, no? If you want controllable costs and you don't want people using your service because interest explodes, then just stick to a regular droplet, no? The entire point of this is that if usage explodes, you want to pay to support that usage. That's the entire feature. (Also, HN frontpage traffic isn't that much -- it's a few requests per second at most, not thousands p…
> That seems somewhat opposite to the point of PaaS, no?
Why would that be true? I thought the point of a PaaS was getting a Platform - as a Service. I don't interpret that to mean having no control or limits on potential costs. To me a PaaS is about not wanting to manage a the metal or infra under the app. Which i don't think is misguided or inaccurate.
To look at it differently: I am a customer to someone. I am a customer who wants to buy a product that manages all of the infra for my application. I also have a limited budget, and the notion of an unlimited budget is an instant no for me.
Call the XaaS whatever you like, but my motivation is clear. Maybe DO doesn't want me as a customer (if what you say is true about PaaS), but i think there's opportunity there for a new XaaS.
Re: DigitalOcean App Platform
#107So if I understand correctly, DigitalOcean just built an inferior version of caprover? (for which a digital ocean one-click droplet exists BTW) Caprover is essentially a really nice GUI for docker swarm, Let's encrypt and nginx. https://caprover.com/
Their value add is that it's a managed service
So it's what - easier to buy? Can be managed from the same web site that you use to manage your droplets, instead of having two UIs?
Re: DigitalOcean App Platform
#108I am so glad to see this. I was looking to deploy an app and the choice is either Heroku or manage your own server which I don't want to do. Heroku gives instant deployment for the most common types of apps (python/java/ruby). It's PaaS done right, it's fantastic. You should really have a look if you're not aware of it, it's only $7 for a starter app. Problem is, scaling up is about $50 per gigabyte of memory which m…
How does Heroku and these app hosting services handle updates to the underlying OS and other dependencies?
Do they only patch non-breaking updates? Or are you on their schedule to ensure your app will run on the latest version?
Re: DigitalOcean App Platform
#109Very cool. I'll definitely give it a test spin. I've been a big fan of PaaS but Render / App Engine / Beanstalk fall a bit short on dev ux. This looks the most promising. If you can add multiple regions and wildcard ssl, you'll solve 2 big problems we have with Heroku.
Re: DigitalOcean App Platform
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is laughable - billing is logically separated from droplet use, so unlike other providers DO charges for the potential to use a capability, rather than actual use, regardless of whether it is consumed. I got stung badly by this - charged for X droplets capability when zero droplets capability was being used for several months. Explained the misunderstanding to DO, got no sympathy & no refund. Won't touch them ag…
This is what makes "the cloud" profitable. If your droplet isn't using all of it's resources (CPU, RAM, DISK), they are able to oversell their capacity.
To be clear, I had no deployed resources, but was still charged as if I had. As it turns out, it's impossible to cancel the "standing charge" without recourse to support.
There's a difference between load balancing of shared resources and (what I believe must be) deliberately deceptive practices. A customer-centric company would send an email to notify you of this kind of over-charging.
It's premeditated and dispicable.