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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?

#211
post #17

We are really recommending https://www.clever-cloud.com/ . Their stack is awesome, great uptime and great support.

Are you planning to make a disclosure regarding that statement, such as being co-founders with Quentin Adam, the founder of Clever Cloud, in other projects?

Other project meaning being contributor to open source together?

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

#213

I moved to a Hetzner dedicated instance with cloudflare in front. Rails Postgres memcached all run on docker. Vs Heroku with cloudflare in front Postgres from heroku and memcached with an add on. 1. Very little. I put the app in docker a long time ago for local development but still used heroku for prod. I dumped my db and imported it into a docker run db on Hetzner. One thing to note: I did not expose the db to the…

I am curious why you chose S3 over B2?

The advantage B2 offers is lower pricing

The advantage S3 offers is seamless integration with other AWS services

IMHO, the ease of integration has significant value, it would take a very sizable S3 bill for me to consider not using S3

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

#214
post #59

I have 4 apps running on fly.io for most of this year and can recommend them. 2 are elixir apps that have been created on fly, 1 was an elixir app I had running on heroku, and 1 was rails app on heroku I recently migrated. I used their heroku migrator and it worked pretty much automatically. I had a few steps to follow to move the DB, but their docs covered it - https://fly.io/docs/rails/getting-started/migrate-from-…

> Fly is innovative in the same way Heroku was when it launched I've not had a chance to play with it yet, what are they doing that's innovative. (Genuine question, not being cynical).

The big one as a layman is they've invested in tooling for "edge" compute - similar to CloudFlare distributing your static assets worldwide for faster responses, Fly gives you the tools to do the same for your app servers.

If you've got a worldwide audience you can set up your app in Dallas, Paris, Chennai, and Tokyo, have it auto-scale (and re-balance) instances based on which regions are the most in demand (eg, minimum 2 app servers per region, max 20 app servers, and it'll auto drift them throughout the day as needed). It also puts all your servers on a common VPN for communication, and they've got some tooling in place to help manage things like db replicas, replaying write requests back to the primary db env, etc.

It's not necessarily trivial to port any old app over (if you're doing writes every request for logging etc, that's something you'd want to change up backgrounding the writes) but it really can make a huge impact in responsiveness once you're set up.

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

#215
I tried many PaaS providers and ended up settling on Render, mostly because of its minimal boilerplate and lack of proprietary tech or vendor lock-in. There is a custom infrastructure-as-code YAML file, but it is optional and pretty nice in its own right, anyway. I get the sense that the Render team cares about DX and doing things the right way for the long term. Moving there from Heroku is simple as the platforms have similar capabilities and there is a migration guide - a day or two unless you are deeply integrated into Heroku’s buildpacks, etc.

Heroku recently removed their free tier. Render has a free tier that is pretty generous and very usable. For paid plans, Render pricing is roughly equivalent to Heroku. However, I find Render’s pricing significantly easier to understand and thus more friendly. Heroku has pricing tiers with varying features and sometimes you have to upgrade to get a feature even if you don’t need more resources. Additionally, Heroku can be vague about some of their specs, particularly when it comes to how much CPU you are promised. Render, on the other hand, gives the same features to all paid plans and then the resources just scale up and out. I much prefer Render’s pricing model, even though for me the cost is about the same.

My one major gripe about Render is that they don’t have a CLI. I find a CLI to be a very important part of any PaaS. Heroku has a great CLI, Render doesn’t, and the feature request to create one has been open for three years. Clearly it was not a priority for them. That said, the ticket did just get marked as In Progress a few days ago, so I am optimistic, but we will have to see where that leads.

https://render.com/

https://feedback.render.com/features/p/render-cli

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

#216
Dokku + DigitalOcean droplet and managed postgres.

1. The migration - from "I just learned about Dokku" to "deployed my app for testing" - took about two hours.

2. I'm an urban planner who dabbles in front-end development. DevOps is not my thing.

3. Not too valuable of learnings. Overall, the dokku commands are almost identical to heroku commands (by design). So the transition was smooth and comfortable.

4. Costs: I chose droplet and postgres services with DO that equaled our heroku costs. But we get about 4x the ram now. The site is much faster.

5. Rails/postgres. We don't track hits, but it's pretty popular in terms of, uh, maps for finding pinball machines.

6. I haven't figured out how to set up logging. I would like some kind of "last 5 days of logs, being piped to somewhere." It seems simple, but I don't quite get it yet. I also miss the "usage" metrics from heroku that showed ram and stuff throughout the day. But I guess I pretty much get that with DO and Scout APM.

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

#217
Picked up a NUC and moving my apps there (several BE only things like bots with FE served off GH Pages and one small app with some server processing that gets like 600 unique visitors a month). They were all served off the Heroku domain anyway so I'll just move them to DynDNS. Will take several years to make it worth not just paying Heroku but at least I won't have to play this game again when Render or Fly.io end up having to restrict their free tiers as well.

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

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The reason, I (founder of Coolify) choose that, it was faster. I’m currently making a feature, that will change this. All services could be defined with a simple yaml file that won’t be hardcoded. They will be sitting in a repository and everyone can add any service with a simple yaml file. It is definitely more maintainable than the current solution, but with the current solution, I could iterate faster. :)

Death to yaml. Thank you.

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

#219
post #59

I have 4 apps running on fly.io for most of this year and can recommend them. 2 are elixir apps that have been created on fly, 1 was an elixir app I had running on heroku, and 1 was rails app on heroku I recently migrated. I used their heroku migrator and it worked pretty much automatically. I had a few steps to follow to move the DB, but their docs covered it - https://fly.io/docs/rails/getting-started/migrate-from-…

Related to the thread, How practical is it to setup the distributed routing stuff of fly yourself? Seems you have to buy an anycast-ip from somewhere or become your own ISP/network provider, configure a bunch of bgp routers & routes but that seems impractical for most. Stuff like Akamai, Cloudflare, Route53 have anycast-dns but that seem specifically for dns queries, not responding to a query and routing it somewhere…

You'll need to acquire a /24 (that'll cost somewhere around $15,000), and then sign a deal with an upstream network provider who will accept BGP announcements. The actual networking part of it isn't that hard. To make the /24 worth it, you'll want a bunch of different regions, so you'll be paying for hosting in each.

Check out https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1abmV_mXWWCsVxHLfouSi...

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

#220
post #59

I have 4 apps running on fly.io for most of this year and can recommend them. 2 are elixir apps that have been created on fly, 1 was an elixir app I had running on heroku, and 1 was rails app on heroku I recently migrated. I used their heroku migrator and it worked pretty much automatically. I had a few steps to follow to move the DB, but their docs covered it - https://fly.io/docs/rails/getting-started/migrate-from-…

> Fly is innovative Most definitely. For most parts, it is hashicorp-as-a-service but without hashicorp!

There's a bunch of Hashi in there.
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