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Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

blog.jalada.co.uk

61–70 of 119 posts

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#61
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…

Funny, but for run of the mill text written by humans you almost always improve things by running

s/it's/its/

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#62
post #29

The author writes about spinning virtual machine from Linode. There's one cool alternative I found: Hetzner Online[1] leases dedicated hardware that their other customers stopped using or ordered but didn't use, etc. It is in form of reverse auction - unused hardware gets cheaper until someone rents it. You can get i7-3770 server with 2x3 TB disks and 16 GB RAM for 32 EUR per month. That's not much more money than li…

Can confirm - I've been using Hetzner for over 2 years now with no problems. I serve quite a large amount of traffic on an EX40 (it was costing me a fortune when I was with AWS).

Although a company I worked for had a Hetzner server where 3 out 4 of the hard disks failed. So it might be wise to do regular backups off-site.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree - do they still lock you to their db? if they do then you are going to have to do a lot of work if you want to move to a different platform

Absolutely not. You can use Cloud Datastore, or you can connect to any database that can communicate over sockets or http, including Cloud SQL. Of note is that Datastore has a free tier, Cloud SQL does not, and Socket usage can incur (some) cost when communicating with other databases. I've seen many Python apps that connect to a free MongoDB instance hosted on Mongolab. (also worth noting that Node.js support for Ap…

> also worth noting that Node.js support for App Engine is currently in beta.

Is this public? I have been waiting to hear this for ages! Great News.

I am planning a switch to node simply so I can run the same code on the front and back end. I was not looking forward to learning how to administer a server.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#64
Ummm if your hobby isn't worth $14 a month to you then why is it worth it for Heroku to support it for nothing? This article is dumb. Remember when domain names cost $75 for 2 years and bottom tier hosting was $35.

They are a business. They don't owe anyone shit, it is nice they give anything.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#65
post #29

The author writes about spinning virtual machine from Linode. There's one cool alternative I found: Hetzner Online[1] leases dedicated hardware that their other customers stopped using or ordered but didn't use, etc. It is in form of reverse auction - unused hardware gets cheaper until someone rents it. You can get i7-3770 server with 2x3 TB disks and 16 GB RAM for 32 EUR per month. That's not much more money than li…

Was Hetzner not the company that stored the customers password in plaintext a few years back? Since I am not entirely sure on this please correct me if I am wrong.

But the prices are nice, thanks for posting this. Would love to use dedicated hardware but suspect that i am too dumb to secure my box good enough and end up in a botnet or as a spam server.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#66
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…

If only these things supported FreeBSD…

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#67
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…

Any plans for FreeBSD support?

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree - do they still lock you to their db? if they do then you are going to have to do a lot of work if you want to move to a different platform

Absolutely not. You can use Cloud Datastore, or you can connect to any database that can communicate over sockets or http, including Cloud SQL. Of note is that Datastore has a free tier, Cloud SQL does not, and Socket usage can incur (some) cost when communicating with other databases. I've seen many Python apps that connect to a free MongoDB instance hosted on Mongolab. (also worth noting that Node.js support for Ap…

Oh, do you mean as a managed VM?

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#69

Ummm if your hobby isn't worth $14 a month to you then why is it worth it for Heroku to support it for nothing? This article is dumb. Remember when domain names cost $75 for 2 years and bottom tier hosting was $35. They are a business. They don't owe anyone shit, it is nice they give anything.

Nobody said they owe hobbyists anything or that it was unethical to charge whatever they do, just that it makes them unappealing to an hobbyist.

And the "remember when" is irrelevant. Costs have dropped for everyone, including them.

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