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Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

blog.jalada.co.uk

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Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#51

Post by [deleted] »

lexcorvus wrote: post #48
savant wrote: post #18

A reasonable option for hobbyists is Dokku[1], a single-server heroku clone. I'm also pretty excited about Convox[2], and would definitely recommend that early adopters check it out. I get that people are frustrated with heroku's pricing, but at the end of the day I think that if your side project isn't worth the money you spend on it's hosting, maybe you should look into other side projects? If it's truly not a mone…

Correcting grammar and spelling errors—especially in public—is always a tough call: upon judging that an error is systematic and not a simple typo, do you help the writer avoid the error in perpetuity—even if it embarrasses them a little, and even if you'll probably get downvoted for being pedantic or offtopic? In this case, I've determined the downsides are worth the possibility of sparing the author a lifetime of e…

[deleted]

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#52

Post by holografix »

I for one think it's a good thing Heroku is not joining the herd in a race to the bottom.

$7 dollars a month to run a little app? That's less than I spend on coffee each day and I'm glad that money is going towards differentiated and valuable service.

I have a couple of toy apps, a personal blog and a "not such a toy" app on Heroku and I have used their services for free for AGES - more than fair enough that they make some money.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#53

Post by orthoganol »

holografix wrote: post #52

I for one think it's a good thing Heroku is not joining the herd in a race to the bottom. $7 dollars a month to run a little app? That's less than I spend on coffee each day and I'm glad that money is going towards differentiated and valuable service. I have a couple of toy apps, a personal blog and a "not such a toy" app on Heroku and I have used their services for free for AGES - more than fair enough that they mak…

Except it's $14, because I can't remember the last time I built even a trivial app that didn't incorporate background processes somehow (the extra $7).

Then it's an extra $20/mo if you want SSL. Which you will most likely want.

That $7/mo just became $34/mo.

Bye, bye Heroku.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#54

Post by cwbrandsma »

lexcorvus wrote: post #48
savant wrote: post #18

A reasonable option for hobbyists is Dokku[1], a single-server heroku clone. I'm also pretty excited about Convox[2], and would definitely recommend that early adopters check it out. I get that people are frustrated with heroku's pricing, but at the end of the day I think that if your side project isn't worth the money you spend on it's hosting, maybe you should look into other side projects? If it's truly not a mone…

Correcting grammar and spelling errors—especially in public—is always a tough call: upon judging that an error is systematic and not a simple typo, do you help the writer avoid the error in perpetuity—even if it embarrasses them a little, and even if you'll probably get downvoted for being pedantic or offtopic? In this case, I've determined the downsides are worth the possibility of sparing the author a lifetime of e…

There is a whole lot of "I'm an asshole" conveyed in that statement of yours.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#55

Post by joshmn »

orthoganol wrote: post #53
holografix wrote: post #52

I for one think it's a good thing Heroku is not joining the herd in a race to the bottom. $7 dollars a month to run a little app? That's less than I spend on coffee each day and I'm glad that money is going towards differentiated and valuable service. I have a couple of toy apps, a personal blog and a "not such a toy" app on Heroku and I have used their services for free for AGES - more than fair enough that they mak…

Except it's $14, because I can't remember the last time I built even a trivial app that didn't incorporate background processes somehow (the extra $7). Then it's an extra $20/mo if you want SSL. Which you will most likely want. That $7/mo just became $34/mo. Bye, bye Heroku.

For something small (assuming it is), you can get away using Unicorn as your Rails server (assuming Rails), you can spawn a worker inside your dyno using before_fork and #spawn.

For SSL, you can use CloudFlare as your DNS and take advantage of their SSL feature.

While not ideal, does it need to be ideal for a trivial, probably-not-super-high-functioning-hacky-app?

There's always Cloud66 — which I've used to great success. I have two servers (e3/32GB/4x250gb enterprise SSDs in HW RAID on nice pipes for less than $100 a month) that I rent, threw vSphere on it, hired a $50/month competent and trusted off-shore sysadmin team, and loaded up a couple VMs.

It's not completely ideal, and I understand I'm trading stability for a couple bucks, but in scaling my clients have saved a bunch.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#56

Post by [deleted] »

lexcorvus wrote: post #48
savant wrote: post #18

A reasonable option for hobbyists is Dokku[1], a single-server heroku clone. I'm also pretty excited about Convox[2], and would definitely recommend that early adopters check it out. I get that people are frustrated with heroku's pricing, but at the end of the day I think that if your side project isn't worth the money you spend on it's hosting, maybe you should look into other side projects? If it's truly not a mone…

Correcting grammar and spelling errors—especially in public—is always a tough call: upon judging that an error is systematic and not a simple typo, do you help the writer avoid the error in perpetuity—even if it embarrasses them a little, and even if you'll probably get downvoted for being pedantic or offtopic? In this case, I've determined the downsides are worth the possibility of sparing the author a lifetime of e…

[deleted]

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#57

Post by joshmn »

sotojuan wrote: post #37
PascalW wrote: post #19

Heroku indeed used to be very generous. I totally get why they are making these changes, it's hard to sustain this in the long run. That said; for hobby stuff I've switched to a cheap VPS plus Dokku [0] and haven't looked back. Works with Heroku buildpacks and even runs custom Dockerfiles if you need anything fancy. Hardly requires any maintenance. There's a couple of alternatives like Deis [1] and Flynn [2] that off…

Dokku + a $5 or $10 Digital Ocean droplet is a great combo.

I love Dokku, but DOs performance has tanked so hard, and is slowly becoming a haven for spam and "hackers". So many better alternatives.

Current favorites (in no specific order): OVH (don't judge, their performance is wicked, just don't expect support), RAMNode, BuyVM, Vultr, 6sync, SparkNode.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#58

Post by area51org »

iza wrote: post #36
shostack wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is it not in fact up for 24hrs if it has to wake up when you try to access it again?

According to https://www.openshift.com/products/pricing/plan-comparison the free plan idles after 24 hours of inactivity ( https://developers.openshift.com/en/managing-idling.html ) However you can work around it by hitting your server with an http request every 24 hours, or upgrade to the Bronze Plan which apparently has $0 base price anyway so I'm not sure what the downside is.

Openshift user here: there is no downside. Bronze truly is $0/mo. It's just that you have to given them a CC number (while you do not need to do that for the "free" plan). Why the CC number? Bronze lets you pay for more features if you want them—but there's no obligation.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#59

Post by baggachipz »

eatitraw wrote: post #5
shostack wrote: post #3

While my instinctive reaction to Heroku's shift was "ugh, that sucks, how dare they," I have to say I get it. It is hard to build a successful business with that model given their offering. However to the comment about "git push heroku master," someone that is an "early" programmer like myself finds that level of simplification helpful when I'm focusing on things like learning all the other things that could go wrong…

> I'm wondering if there are any recommendations for "Heroku-like" providers with a free tier that stays up 24/7 for super simple Rails and Sinatra apps, perhaps with a DB. OpenShift( https://www.openshift.com/ ) may be the service you're looking for. I haven't tried it, but it looks nice.

I use OpenShift and I think it's fantastic. You can even install your own SSL cert on the free tier (if you register their "Bronze" level, IIRC) for no additional charge. It's perfect for a hobbyist project and then scaling it up if necessary.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#60

Post by danneu »

lolsal wrote: post #23

I think it's still pretty friendly to hobbyists (throw up a quick Flask app for a demo, etc), but it's probably no longer very friendly to 'get everything for free'ists (like 24/7 compute, >512MB ram, etc). The benefit to me of using something like Heroku is not because I get more CPU/RAM than an equivalently priced Linode instance - the value is in not having to manage a Linode instance at all. I'd also argue that g…

Also, once I started accumulating projects on Heroku, I appreciated the consistency across maintaining, managing, and deploying those projects.

Meanwhile every time I'd deploy a new project to Linode, I'd use a different deploy script/strategy as I'd learn slightly better ways of doing it. It's much more annoying to do maintenance on my Linode projects I haven't touched in 6+ months, and it turns out I usually don't have the energy to re-credentialize in the idiosyncrasies of each sideproject, so they languish.

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