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Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

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Re: Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

#21

Post by throwawaykai »

ericpauley wrote: post #4

This whole debacle has been such short-term thinking from Salesforce. That after carrying these free projects for years they couldn't stomach more than 30d of data retention is just the icing on the cake. In my view this has caused yet further reputational harm for Heroku, and is going to have a long-term effect on the bottom line from paid projects. The value prop of Heroku has always been being able to sleep at nig…

Herokai here. Unfortunately we had no choice on the data retention front — once we’ve disconnected your database, we aren’t ALLOWED to hold your data for more than 30 days. That’s part of the data scrubbing protocol that we agree to when you sign up. We fought hard for 90+ days internally, but in the end couldn’t get over the issue that we’d be in violation of our contracts with customers.

Re: Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

#23

Post by m00x »

fireworks wrote: post #5
swader999 wrote: post #3

I'm curious how this affected your projects on paid dynos, can you provide more details around that?

So I did not realize this at first (would have helped if I were, you know, emailed some information about this), but my project was still using a free Postgres addon despite being on a paid dyno setup. So that I suppose was nuked along with the general free tier deprecation.

Did they explain why the notifications didn't work?

Re: Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

#24

Post by xp84 »

rovr138 wrote: post #10

Well, I moved everything I had to a VPS for the time being because I left it to the end. So I take this opportunity to ask, what alternatives have people moved to? I really haven't gone back to look what's out there. Not looking for free, just alternatives to review.

For what kind of an app? If I was tasked to put an app someplace today, the answer would depend if it was easily containerized, and what kind of scale you're talking about.

For small apps, if containerized, I would host on Google Cloud Platform using App Engine Flexible Environment: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/flexible Add on their managed database, of course.

But also, random VPSs are so cheap that if it works fine as is, you could do a lot worse than just running it on Linode, Digital Ocean, Hetzner, etc.

Re: Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

#25

Post by throwawaykai »

shortcake27 wrote: post #11
gwbas1c wrote: post #2

What frustrated me about Heroku nuking free projects was that the paid version was, IMO, too expensive. (Granted, I understand that the free tier was probably a money sink for them.) $5-10 a month is pocket change in some contexts, but for a hobby or a one-off project, it's a huge chunk of change. I really wish they offered a lower-cost tier.

Or let me share dynos across all my projects. $5-$10 per month for all projects, sounds good! $5 per month for each project adds up very quickly.

That was the new “eco” plan that was introduced alongside the ending of free plans — $5/mo for 1000 hours shared across all eco dynos.

Re: Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

#27

Post by danpalmer »

m00x wrote: post #19

I don't really understand. You were paying for the dyno, but they deleted your instance anyway?

They deleted the database.

On Heroku, databases and dynos are completely distinct entities, each with their own payment plans.

When you set up a dyno and “add” a database, as most people do, it’s really easy to think that they are part of the same plan, and conclude that the “pro” or paid dyno is actually the combo of the dyno and database. They are not.

I understand why they did this, databases can be shared between applications, that’s handy, but this is a sharp edge.

Re: Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

#28

Post by xp84 »

Towaway69 wrote: post #18
gwbas1c wrote: post #2

What frustrated me about Heroku nuking free projects was that the paid version was, IMO, too expensive. (Granted, I understand that the free tier was probably a money sink for them.) $5-10 a month is pocket change in some contexts, but for a hobby or a one-off project, it's a huge chunk of change. I really wish they offered a lower-cost tier.

My personal take is that I'd rather work with heroku than dealing with aws or gcs. Sure there are others out there that provide the same easy of use, I am just too lazy to switch ;) OTOH I've never had them wipe a database on me, so I guess that would be the motivation to move on.

> I've never had them wipe a database on me,

Give it time, apparently ;)

If you're like me and are really into ease of use, I really endorse Digital Ocean. People don't seem to use it in Big Important Companies, but I never had a problem with anything I hosted there when I was my last, medium-sized company, and everything was so easy to manage in the GUI without having to learn proprietary APIs and whole stacks of infrastructure-as-code stuff like in AWS land.

Re: Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

#29

Post by craigkerstiens »

throwawaykai wrote: post #21
ericpauley wrote: post #4

This whole debacle has been such short-term thinking from Salesforce. That after carrying these free projects for years they couldn't stomach more than 30d of data retention is just the icing on the cake. In my view this has caused yet further reputational harm for Heroku, and is going to have a long-term effect on the bottom line from paid projects. The value prop of Heroku has always been being able to sleep at nig…

Herokai here. Unfortunately we had no choice on the data retention front — once we’ve disconnected your database, we aren’t ALLOWED to hold your data for more than 30 days. That’s part of the data scrubbing protocol that we agree to when you sign up. We fought hard for 90+ days internally, but in the end couldn’t get over the issue that we’d be in violation of our contracts with customers.

Having worked at Heroku and had a large part in building Heroku Postgres I do not recall this explicit policy, and it seems very squirrelly to me. Maybe this came in as a policy in recent years and it is the case, but still seems like hiding behind a policy as opposed to doing right by customers.

You could easily block all incoming connections to the database. For a free database of 10k rows there were no SLAs, and you would still technically be hosting the database.

Even taking a dump and emailing it to me feels like a safer option here.

There were better answers here for sure. If the honest answer is we just didn't feel the effort was worth it for this class of users at least own that.

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