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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?

#311

Post by petercooper »

satvikpendem wrote: post #276
0x457 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Odd mentality. You don't want to feel like a freeloader, but don't want to pay the asking price.

Hence why they said they want to "pay a little." If this is a common objection to the price of a good in a market, and if someone else comes by offering a simpler product at, for example, half the price, they could take the market. This is an example of a low-cost pricing strategy: https://stratechery.com/concept/strategy/low-cost-strategy/

I know the ending to this story! The "someone else" comes along, gets a lot of buzz, attracts users, gets funded, then the investors say "you should be focusing on the enterprise market and increasing prices!" Then they become like the company they were trying to undercut and sell for $100m to RandomCorp.

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

#312

Post by rurban »

justjake wrote: post #308
rurban wrote: post #117

Tried railway (unstable), boyab (unable to setup) and settled with fly.io (easy to setup, stable). all free tiers, even with a free custom domain.

Railway founder here Can you mention what particularly was unstable?

my service was not reachable after two days running. guess the vm wakeup from a an external request was too slow.

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

#313

Post by vooxy »

I used AWS because of PCI compliance, and it was HELL.

It took a whole week to set up a simple EKS cluster for one basic Rails app.

Everything is ridiculously complicated, and the docs are terrible. When the Log4j exploit occurred, I had to go and figure out how to search the logs. I had to request them to make an update manually, and it took them 3 days to do it!

Cloudwatch is terrible. EKS UX is terrible.

Unless you want to have a full-time job of wasting time with AWS, stay away!

Cost is horrible as well. Heroku was $7/month and AWS around $80.

Fortunately there are several good options. After seeing HN posts recently, fly.io seems popular.

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

#314

Post by sleepyhead »

movedx wrote: post #307
sleepyhead wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made a video about it but it is not published yet. I hope to publish it soon here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkc8xf5A7qCQydN6tG0BmmQ There was no misconfiguration, just millions of DNS requests but not millions of actual users. I was in contact with AWS support multiple times. The only solution was so use AWS Shield Advanced. They did refund most of the charges but it was too risky for me. Even after I moved…

Yeah, the problem is, dnsimple.com isn't going to NOT charge you for the same thing. They have T&Cs too. I'm guessing AWS refunded close to 100% of fees associated with provable bad DNS requests.

Why is it a problem that dnsimple is not going to charge for bogus DNS requests? (or any DNS requests for that matter).

AWS did do a refund but it requires me to monitor usage and do some investigation. I really don't want to spend time monitoring DNS requests.

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

#315

Post by josegonzalez »

ryantgtg wrote: post #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…

Late reply, but you might want to checkout our Vector integration for log shipping. You can ship your logs to whatever service you want.

Disclosure: I'm the Dokku maintainer.

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

#316

Post by ida-silver »

For simple web apps? Netlify/Vercel for frontend + Serverless for backend (AWS, Lolo)

1. Maybe a day 2. Not a lot 3. You learn event-driven architecture but it wasn't new to me 4. It's free for me as long as you don't attach a company github with Netlfiy or Vercel (then you move out of free tier) and then AWS has enough free credits, Lolo is free for your first two apps (although a bit of a hassle to have to re-deploy every 7 days if you don't want to pay 9€) 5. Web platform primarily with maybe 10-30k hits per month, but also a few web apps. Maybe move the Serverless api from AWS when it increases to not incur too much of a cost.

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

#317

Post by kika »

We went from Heroku to a self-hosted OpenShift cluster on AWS EC2 for compute and managed AWS services for state (RDS and Elasticache).

1. A few months. The actual changes to the apps were not fundamental, but we discovered a lot of things we didn't know about our own codebase and it had to be fixed. The majority of changes were devops plumbing not Ruby/Rails. The move itself, including all the necessary admin changes and supplemental work took about 1.5 years from decision to cut off date.

2. Me - about 30 years of total experience, 10+ years of devops/SW mixed experience. But total Ruby noob (and still is, you don't need to know Ruby to move apps)

3. The move made me a multimillionaire and a couple people billionaires and another 100 or so millionaires or multimillionaires. I mean this move opened the path to the IPO and we became one of meme-stocks of 2021. So even if I never touch AWS, Openshift, Heroku or Ruby it was totally worth it. I didn't learn any fundamental new things (after 30 years in the industry it rarely happens), but solidified my skills in many departments. I never run such a massive containerized workload before, for example.

4. Nobody cared actually. We grew like bamboo at that moment, so very difficult to compare apples to apples.

5. A single monolithic app about 0.5M LOC and a few smaller ones. Hundreds thousands of customers, tens of millions of revenue/month

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

#318

Post by vladfr »

salmo wrote: post #124
movedx wrote: post #49

(I'm assuming the OP is referring to production workloads.) I think PaaS is awesome. I actually consider moving to one of the managed offerings from time to time... then I look at the pricing. As a systems engineer specialising in automation, it's hard for me to justify the $75-100/month fee from a PaaS provider (not including network bandwidth), when I currently pay that now for the same thing in AWS including netwo…

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 incide…

Um, k8s was built for hundreds of clusters. I doubt it's 0 adoption for 100+ clusters, we have hundreds across AWS and Azure.

I've read of smaller companies building their own PaaS over K8s, which is in fact how Kubernetes makes sense.

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

#319

Post by pelagicAustral »

aantix wrote: post #206

For Rails apps, I've moved over to Hatch Box. https://hatchbox.io/ Now I can deploy multiple apps to a single server, not have to worry about provisioning. I pay for the single server instance. It's been great for my hobby projects.

Same here. I manage all my projects via Hatchbox. Use UpCloud for vps and thats it... not free but closes thing for seamless deployments.

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

#320

Post by ek750 »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #274
andrasbacsai wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That will be Coolify Cloud :) ( https://beta.coolify.io ).

Ruby/Rails aren't listed as supported apps. My how ruby has fallen. :( https://docs.coollabs.io/coolify/applications/#supported-app...

yeah, that's disappointing. I'm a Ruby fan and my latest startup is built on the rails stack.

It's using buildpacks though, so shouldn't it be (easily) supported?

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