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

Can you share a link to their new plans? The pricing listed on their old page (https://www.heroku.com/pricing) still showing $7/mo as their cheapest option and it's already an overkill for my applications. In comparison, the cheapest option on fly.io is $1.94/mo (https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/).

Note: I know $7 is the maximum cost, but by default their hobby tier app will not sleep, so I guess it still costs $7/mo to run in the end?

Thanks!

I used DO because I had gotten some free credits as a student and they were valid for a year, so it gave me time to experiment. Once I went through the guides, I started researching the topic further, each time expanding on anything I didn't know or understand.

To go from Heroku to home server, I spent about a year all in all doing the research, learning what needs to be done, what hardware, what security considerations and so on. Before buying the server hardware and doing that, I setup a VM with the Linux distro I wanted to use, mimicked the storage setup and then went about doing the whole setup from start to finish and documenting things along the way. Installing, setting up users, changing login policies, adding drives, formatting them, hard drive error checking and automated notifications, setting up docker containers, docker container backups, container updates, limiting access of containers, setting up network shares, LAN sync, multimedia playback, software backups and automated server backups.

Each new step would highlight a new learning opportunity and would raise new questions. It's really interesting and I went ahead and installed Pop OS (initially I used Zorin os pro) on all my devices which gave me a place to test out small scripts to automate a system reinstall/setup. My next goal is to collate all of this information and organize it into a guide that explores this setup from start to finish, but that's a few months out.

After that I want to move away from a single Linux install running to a Proxmox install on my home server, a couple of VMs running my services and space set aside to allow me to start a new VM when I want to test something out. I also want to build my own router using Open BSD. Hope this helps!

Heroku's erratic performance over the last year or so combined with what we see as a steady decline in the responsiveness (and sometimes quality) of Heroku's support made it too painful to ignore. Their security breach was obviously also a big motivation, but by then we had already made the decision.

We are moving as much as we can into GCP.

- Web app: Cloud Run

- Background jobs: Compute Engine

- Heroku Postgres: Google Cloud SQL

- Heroku Redis: Redis Cloud (https://redis.com/redis-enterprise-cloud)

- Deploys: Custom scripts

- Provisioning: Terraform

It has taken about 6 months for me to do most of the work, with some help from the team on some of the heavy lifting. It's not full-time work though, so perhaps 3-4 months if you count person-hours.

I have decent linux sysadmin experience, but that's about it. Had to brush up on Terraform. Testing GCP services took a long time. Their docs are often good, but important details are sometimes missing or not easy to find when you're doing initial research. I don't trust the GCP console (web UI) much these days; the `gcloud` command shows your actual resources and not some half-baked abstraction. Sometimes resources aren't even visible in the UI.

The learnings were valuable for me personally. I've been interested in doing more ops-related things. For the company, the extra control we get over our own service levels is the major benefit. It has a cost in terms of developer experience and resources we need to allocate to ops as well.

Costs are about the same. Cloud SQL seems cheaper. Redis Cloud is almost exactly the same price (which feels like a lot tbh).

If you're interested in working with us (remotely) with ops, send me an email at other.water6357@fastmail.com

I saw you mention the K8s soonest: is that your scaling solution? Seems it would be simpler.

Regardless I think we may look into this.

Depending on the permissions they ask for, this may be limited to modifying webhooks in the repositories you specify.