Use Hatchbox. With Linode. I love it. https://hatchbox.io/
If your problem with Heroku is the price why would you use something that is even more expensive?
Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?
31–40 of 107 posts
Re: Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?
#32This looks like a serious agency, so I'm stuck on the question of why the free tier is so important to them versus simply paying for Heroku. Surely doing a mass migration to a new PaaS just to claim a small per-project savings is a dubious proposition given the inevitably of a future rug-pull from wherever you migrate. On the other hand, if you're an individual with a bunch of small projects and you want to host them…
They mention their personal projects in the article.
Re: Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?
#33All the free alternatives will eventually get rid of their free tier too - could be 1 year, could be 10 years. As the author stated, they had 25 free instances running. They converted over to paid, so maybe they became a profitable client. However, all the users who have 25+ instances and never pay over the course of 10 year isn't sustainable for a business.
It's been 12 years since Amazon announced their free tier, and it's still going strong. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2010/10/21/announ...
maybe heroku and fly and others could start shelling books and shoes to help out...
it's been 12 years, but they had a decade of other business units helping to fund their service, and can afford loss leaders like few other businesses.
Re: Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?
#34All the free alternatives will eventually get rid of their free tier too - could be 1 year, could be 10 years. As the author stated, they had 25 free instances running. They converted over to paid, so maybe they became a profitable client. However, all the users who have 25+ instances and never pay over the course of 10 year isn't sustainable for a business.
We just shut down our last Heroku dyno. Kudos to all the people who worked there, there were a lot of talented ones but lately the service has been a joke.
As a Heroku user, you pay a premium for AWS instances, essentially, with the premise being that things "just work" and that you get simple deploys.
Well, if by "just", you mean "barely" - sure! We had several hours of outages where Heroku's status page was still green. We even gave them metrics to show that the issue was with their routing layer, and they just told us that it was our apps fault and that perhaps we should get New Relic to see why it's so slow... After several months of prodding they acknowledged that it was their fault. Or, well, they blamed another customer for excessive use of resources or something like that.
As for simpler deploys. We had multiple incidents where our deploys got into some hybrid preboot state. (If you're not familiar with Heroku's terminology, a bit simplified: Preboot enabled = start the new instances, wait three minutes and then reroute traffic. Preboot disabled = stop the old instances, then start the new ones.) In our case, deploying with preboot enabled, Heroku stopped our old instances and then waited three minutes to start new ones... Again, this wasn't acknowledged by support until after several weeks, even those we provided logs showing exactly what happened with our instances. Now they have admitted that it's a bug, but our issue is still open.
Oh, and the Github integration was of course removed when they were hacked, so the DX argument isn't very strong either.
Maybe we were just unlucky, but good riddance...
Re: Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?
#35The article calls out having to learn how to create a Docker image for Fly.io as though it's a bad thing. I consider it a huge bonus if you like taking advantage of free tiers for services.
The whole point is that if you're going to take advantage of a free tier you should do so in a way that switching is trivial. Docker goes a long way to achieving that.
I personally just pay $10/month to Linode and self host these days using Nomad. Less restrictions and more freedom for the cost of a coffee and a bagel.
Re: Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?
#36My biggest take away from trying to find a Heroku alternative is that Heroku is late to the game of charging for a basic app. Other service might be free, but seem to have some sort of catch--only static, or requires a certain infrastructure, or whatever else--and only Heroku had the unopinionated free tier. And while I haven't used their competitors, I'm skeptical they can match Heroku's interface, CLI, add-on ecosystem, documentation, and all the various tutorial and stack overflow questions about their platform.
So, I'm sticking with Heroku. Sure, it'll cost some (and supposedly they're bringing in cheaper tiers than current, too), but it's not a big difference from their competitors, is reasonably priced (from a competitive perspective), and allows me to continue using a tool I know inside along with all the accompanying ecosystem.
I guess after ten years I'll actually have to pay Heroku something for their service. That seems... fine to me. Complaining about that seems petty.
Re: Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?
#37Every conversation on this topic can be summed up as: "Heroku charging $7/mo for hosting is evil. Switch to instead."
Re: Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?
#38The article calls out having to learn how to create a Docker image for Fly.io as though it's a bad thing. I consider it a huge bonus if you like taking advantage of free tiers for services. The whole point is that if you're going to take advantage of a free tier you should do so in a way that switching is trivial. Docker goes a long way to achieving that. I personally just pay $10/month to Linode and self host these…
I use Time4VPS (which is linked on my blog) or Hetzner for VPSes and Docker Swarm for orchestration (at least for personal stuff, though Nomad or something like K3s can be great too), in combination with a more boring web server like Apache or Nginx for ingress (but Caddy and Traefik are viable as well).
Overall, I'm inclined to agree! You can pick a stack that's as boring or interesting as you want and have your container images work in almost any environment where OCI is supported, with minimal tweaking.
You can use either base images that someone else has made (Bitnami images in particular are rather nice), or build your own, about which I wrote in more detail: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/using-ubuntu-as-the-base-fo...
Currently each of my individual nodes cost around 5-10 euros a month, or I can even use my homelab servers for whatever I want, since they can either be in the same cluster or a separate cluster. Essentially you just adjust some deployment constraints and feed some YAML/HCL into whatever container orchestrator you have. Provided that your registry access is configured correctly, you'll have your software up and running in minutes.
Re: Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?
#39I have zero sympathy for these guys, nor for anyone else running their business on free tier infrastructure. This is the kind of customer nobody needs.
Re: Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?
#40All the free alternatives will eventually get rid of their free tier too - could be 1 year, could be 10 years. As the author stated, they had 25 free instances running. They converted over to paid, so maybe they became a profitable client. However, all the users who have 25+ instances and never pay over the course of 10 year isn't sustainable for a business.
Heroku still has a free tier which is comparable to Render, Fly.io and all the other alternatives people keep bringing up. The mythical "an unlimited number of sites & DBs hosted for free forever" option everyone is looking for simply doesn't exist.
Just double checked and I’m pretty sure this not true? Or at least it won’t be as of November 28. Unless I’m reading something wrong?