Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go? • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by d3nj4l » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 4:21 PM UTC

mijoharas wrote: post #82

Joe8Bit wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can second fly.io, I moved a bunch of personal (but "production") projects from Heroku to it recently (Node, Rust, Rails) and the experience has been great. I can also second their Heroku migrator, worked pretty flawlessly. Overall, my pricing has been about the same or 5-10% less per month. It doesn't have the same "Click this button to add this third-party service to your dynos, with billing included" eco-system…

That's the one thing I haven't seen anywhere else. I think technically, for "run simple automatically built containers with little dev effort." there are many better solutions than heroku. The marketplace is the only existing differentiator for heroku, and I don't really understand why no-one seems to be trying to recreate it. I get "marketplaces" are hard and there's a chicken/egg problem, but is anyone working on i…

Railway sort of offers this: https://railway.app/button.

I've seen it around a couple of times, but ofc it's not hit the same momentum that Heroku had back in the day.

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

#222

Post by a9ex » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 4:24 PM UTC

I moved to a $5 DigitalOcean droplet running Dokku (dokku.com).

To answer your questions:

1) 2 hours for 8 apps — most work was setup of new DNS and testing

2) I have very litte experience in DevOps

3) I think its totally worth it for the additional flexibility and the super cheap cost

4) Just $5 - can’t beat that

5) 8 Ruby Sinatra sites w/ a total of 20k hits/month

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

#223

Post by japhyr » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 4:25 PM UTC

nirui wrote: post #132

holografix wrote: post #119

Controversial opinion: given the vast majority of answers here: cheapskates looking for free tiers wherever they can find them. Heroku should’ve closed that free tier years ago! Now they added some very very cheap plans as well which is fantastic for them = gets rid of some of the horrendous cost from platform abuse they dealt with every quarter. Good for you Heroku, you were always under appreciated by the enterpris…

> Now they added some very very cheap plans as well which is fantastic for them 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…

If you're running a project with a database, you need to take into account the cost of a Hobby dyno and a database add-on. I believe the cheapest Heroku Postgres plan is $9/mo.

So, if you had a light-traffic, or demo, or staging project that was using the free dyno & postgres offering, you went from $0/mo to $16/mo. That's a big jump, depending on your use case.

I'm all for well-restricted free offerings that let you try a platform; Heroku absolutely needed to change its plan. But if the cheapest web app with a db plan is $16/mo, people are going to look for something closer to $5/mo for their low-load deployments.

If I'm wrong about any of this, I'd love to know.

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

#224

Post by raunak » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 4:27 PM UTC

aetch wrote: post #172

I moved a Go app with 20k users/mo from heroku to render. 1. It took about 1 week due to lack of render documentation for Docker and buildpacks. I posted on the render help forum and contacted their support which did respond but were not the most helpful. I ended up finding a single example buildpack file in a render blog post which shed light on how to structure their build system. If I had not found it I dont think…

How was it 0 to 0? Just curious.

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

#225

Post by nkotov » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 4:27 PM UTC

I used to believe there was a future in having a "heroku-like" PaaS on top of your AWS/GCP/Azure. Enough so that I tried to built a company that would be an offering in the space.

The reality is that each of the major cloud providers have gotten so good that it basically defeats the purpose of having your own PaaS on top of them. For 95% of cases, the default products from each cloud provider is good enough now. It's all very easy now.

So the remaining bucket from Heroku that still needs to be filled is for those who have small or side projects and aren't willing to pay (a lot) for hosting. If you're trying to build a business around these "customers", you will be in a world of hurt and just racing to the bottom dollar.

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

#226

Post by dangets » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 4:30 PM UTC

noneeeed wrote: post #200

heeton wrote: 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).

See the recent flurry of their sqlite replication blog posts:

- https://fly.io/blog/introducing-litefs/

- https://fly.io/blog/all-in-on-sqlite-litestream/

This allows for extremely cheap s3 database backups as well as fast local serving layer.

And many more deep dives on their blog - https://fly.io/blog/

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

#227

Post by slugiscool99 » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 4:41 PM UTC

Vercel has been awesome for us - they've solved all these little pain points that really add up. Definitely a great starter service like what Heroku was. Also free for individuals.

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

#228

Post by CamelRocketFish » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 4:41 PM UTC

andrasbacsai wrote: post #190

pdntspa wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No Rails support? :(

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

Any chance of swift server?

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

#229

Post by vorillaz » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 4:44 PM UTC

andrasbacsai wrote: post #70

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…

I am a happy Coolify user and I could say that it is a promising and quite active project with a vivid community. The fact that you can self-host dozens of services using a single VM is a breeze of fresh air.

Furthermore, with just a bunch of dollars you can get a really good VM from Hetzner and host everything there. At the moment I am using Coolify for small Node.js apps as well as using a few more services: - VaultWarden. - Minio as an object storage solution. - Glitchtip as a Sentry alternative.

Essentially, if you are considering privacy and avoid paying a dime to Jeff directly or sideways (most of the PaaS services are built on top of AWS) projects like Coolify, CapRover, Dokku etc are the way to go.

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

#230

Post by joshmanders » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 4:48 PM UTC

awill wrote: post #150

andrasbacsai wrote: post #70

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…

When did it become acceptable for the official installation method to be running a random script on your server? No one should be running that without personally verifying each line. What if I want to uninstall it? (I haven’t looked at this script) but many don’t effectively clean up properly after uninstalling, as that’s an afterthought. What is specifically wrong with the dozens of existing packaging solutions we a…

> No one should be running that without personally verifying each line.

Ok, if you feel so strongly about it, then before you paste the link into your terminal and hit enter to execute it, how about you uh... open the shell script it will execute in your browser and read the contents of it?

You use this idea that people are executing stuff they don't know and blaming the tools for it but don't think to read the script yourself?