Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go?

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This is odd to me as well. The value of PaaS scales with developers. But Heroku et al target small shops.

If you have 100 dev teams, infra experience is a lot of “overhead.” If you have 5, you just make sure some of the devs know how to strace and tcpdump and can collab in an incident. Frankly, building infrastructure is easy. Maintaining it is the hard part. Preventative maintenance, security, recovering from incidents are all much harder than figuring out enough for it to run.

It was a brilliant idea. Let devs be devs. But the price has always been so high that, at scale, it wasn’t far off the HR cost.

We’ve gone 180 on that with k8s. Now you have to understand a datacenter with different vocabulary to effectively leverage it. You see low adoption at “I have an app” because it’s more complicated than it’s worth. Higher adoption above that. But almost 0 adoption at I need 100+ clusters. And 90% of what I see assumes to exist in a single cluster as if etcd never hangs itself.

We’ve built all of these abstractions, but ultimately you have to understand the thing below them (ie Linux and VMs) when performance sucks or something goes boom.

I don’t know how someone walks in and learns it all at once vs my life of learning with the growing system from Unix on physicals to now.

It’s like my life with Java. Most devs don’t understand where to start troubleshooting performance or the JVM, despite rich tooling (magical APM, JFRs, etc).

Vultr.

I program in Go so I get a self-contained executable file at the end of the day that I just upload to the server. So whatever "Heroku" provides is completely irrelevant to me.

I use AWS for personal stuff and it's not labyrinthine at all, I found it very simple to set a budget alert.

But more important than that is of course to have a CloudFront cache infront of anything that exposes S3 storage.

Companies count on the "cheapskates" and the free plans to work as a "gateway drug" to corporate plans.

I sometimes feel this services "need" an affordable paid plan, so I don't "freeload" on their free plans, and I don't need the expensive big plan.

I.e.:

I monitor a bunch of my hobby sites with StatusCake. They're great and I use the free plan but I'd like to pay a little for very simple monitoring. But the first paid plan is around $200 a year. But I don't need the premium plan, I just need the free plan, but paying, so I feel like I'm contributing to the business.

AWS and the others... you've got a free plan, but once you begin to deploy... ;)

DnsMadeEasy. They don't have a free plan, but I'm using their "Small business 10 domain plan". That was $30 a year for years. Past year was $40. Then they got acquired by DigiCert and since last month they've posted their new prices: ~$200 a year for a 5 domain plan.

It happens in a lot of providers, so I guess is a regular VC tactic to acquire volume, clients, publicity or whatever.