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

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

#182
post #15

We have been using "Amazon Web Services". They should market their services more, they definitely have a bright future...

Are you comparing Heroku to EC2 and other non-managed parts of AWS? Because for most parts Heroku and AWS is two different offerings. There are two main reasons to use Heroku: they manage it and they provide easy tools for configuration. Even if AWS provide similar managed services I would assume it is as the rest as AWS: a pain to configure. I use many AWS services and not only it is required to have a PhD in AWS to understand basic tasks but the risk of doing something wrong is high. Take IAM for example. Or just setting up a static website with S3, Cloudfront and Route 53 - what a mess. Not saying that AWS isn't great for many things or for companies wanting more control (and with resources to manage it), but comparing it to Heroku is for most parts not a valid comparison.

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

#183

Hey, Andras here, founder of Coolify ( https://coolify.io ). Coolify is an open-source & self-hostable Heroku / Netlify alternative. Lots of features are added day-by-day and I'm open for new ones. Visit our Github ( https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify ) or our feedback page ( https://feedback.coolify.io/ ) to get more info. A few months ago, I quit my job and started to work on it full-time (best decision I've mad…

Hi! While the project does look very interesting, i'm kind of put off by the code. While it is pretty organized and neat, I can see that all of the services offered are hard-coded. Like the 330 lines long if-else chain in apps/api/src/lib/services/common.ts. This way every time you need to set add a new service to coolify there's the need to ship a new version. Why did you choose to go this way rather than a more gen…

> i'm kind of put off by the code. While it is pretty organized and neat, I can see that all of the services offered are hard-coded. Like the 330 lines long if-else chain in apps/api/src/lib/services/common.ts.

I agree and disagree.

I agree that this kind of approach to coding is something that would put anyone senior-ish off totally, but I disagree at the same time because it's only 20-ish services, and the code is easily refactorable.

My assumption - after having read code 30+ years - is that this is done on purpose, so that they want to stabilise the approach and refactor it later. Though, as we all know, there's no thing as "I'll fix this later" in programming, but still (in this case) not something that would put me off.

Also, it's on github, so I could always refactor it for them if I'm not happy with it.

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

#184
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For personal stuff or business? I'm extremely familiar with AWS at the corporate level but I refuse to use it for personal stuff. Not only are the pricing schemes suspect, the results can be surprising. A single front page feature on HN, for example, could suddenly cost you $150,000 because you didn't wade through enough labyrinthine configuration pages to set the right budgets.

So you're saying that if someone buys access to a kitchen, doesn't learn to cook or operate it safely, burns the place down trying to serve 100,000 people, they'll get a big insurance claim made against them and have a $150k bill? You're kidding me? Are you telling me people have to learn to USE these tools if they don't want a nasty surprise? :-P (I'm being tongue-in-cheek cheeky here.) I know you're mostly pushing…

I ended up with a $700 bill for a month with Route 53 due to bogus DNS requests (a normal month would be like $5 or something). And there is nothing a professional engineer could do anything about it - except pay $3000/month for AWS Shield Advanced.

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

#185
I have some personal apps that I use regularly that were being hosted on the free or $7 tier at Heroku, all three were Rails apps with postgres and one needed redis. I spent about 20 hours trying out AWS, Digital Ocean, and Render.com. I eventually decided on Digital Ocean as the ease of use + pricing was where I wanted it to be. I spend about $14/mo on hosting at Digital Ocean (db + apps) and grabbed a free instance on Redis Cloud. Its currently more expensive than Heroku but it does provide me with better especially with my db setup.

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

#186

Hey, Andras here, founder of Coolify ( https://coolify.io ). Coolify is an open-source & self-hostable Heroku / Netlify alternative. Lots of features are added day-by-day and I'm open for new ones. Visit our Github ( https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify ) or our feedback page ( https://feedback.coolify.io/ ) to get more info. A few months ago, I quit my job and started to work on it full-time (best decision I've mad…

No Rails support? :(

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

#187
Moved backend services for my videogame from Heroku to Render. It's been super-easy, and the service is more responsive and significantly more stable now on Render, despite me paying much less.

1. Almost no work. The app was Node.js + Postgres, it stayed that way and only needed a few environment variable changes plus a database migration.

2. Almost none, I use PaaS because I concentrate on making games, and want to spend as little time touching infrastructure as possible.

3. Learned mostly that switching PaaS is not a big deal if you stick to common offerings (Postgres instead of a fancy exact-purpose-fit DB).

4. ~$100 to $27/mo

5. A Node.js app that gets rather low traffic but needs to be stable, in the 1000s of req/day. It only handles highscores/ranked mode seeds, so low requirements.

6. Would heartily recommend Render if you want to stay with a Heroku-like PaaS approach and they already support what you need.

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

#188

Hey, Andras here, founder of Coolify ( https://coolify.io ). Coolify is an open-source & self-hostable Heroku / Netlify alternative. Lots of features are added day-by-day and I'm open for new ones. Visit our Github ( https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify ) or our feedback page ( https://feedback.coolify.io/ ) to get more info. A few months ago, I quit my job and started to work on it full-time (best decision I've mad…

My whole purpose in using Heroku is to avoid self-hosting something, to get the "platform as a service." Is that not the main attraction of heroku? Maybe not for everyone, if the idea of a self-hosted product as an "alternative" to heroku has traction?

Yes, as lolinder mentioned, there will be a hosted version soon. :)

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

#189

I moved 4 personal websites with a total of 7 services to railway.app (no affiliation) this weekend and was very impressed with how simple it was. Previously these websites were hosted using a combination of GitHub Pages + Heroku + Fly.io but it’s nice to have all of them hosted in a consistent way now. I vastly preferred the railway.app migration to the fly.io migration but fly.io feels much more production ready th…

$10 per GB per month!

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

#190

Hey, Andras here, founder of Coolify ( https://coolify.io ). Coolify is an open-source & self-hostable Heroku / Netlify alternative. Lots of features are added day-by-day and I'm open for new ones. Visit our Github ( https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify ) or our feedback page ( https://feedback.coolify.io/ ) to get more info. A few months ago, I quit my job and started to work on it full-time (best decision I've mad…

No Rails support? :(

Not “natively”, but as lots of people asking, I will add it soon. Try to fit in this week! :)
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