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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

#71

Post by icebraining »

joshmn wrote: post #57
sotojuan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Since we're listing favorites, I'm a fan of TransIP. Similar prices and plans to DO, but in my experience they offer better performance, plus they have a NAS service which makes it appealing if one needs to handle larger amounts of data (up to 400Tb).

No affiliation, just a happy customer.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#72

Post by BlackMonday »

area51org wrote: post #58
iza wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you know how powerfull the free gears are that one gets with each price plan? I have a fantasy basketball league that a few of my coworkers and I play and a free service would be ideal for that. Can the free gear (as a scaled app) manage a postgres database with around 600 MB, or would that be too much?

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#73

Post by jacques_chester »

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.

Cloud Foundry. You can try it through Pivotal Web Services or BlueMix.

It reuses Heroku's code for several buildpacks, particularly Ruby.

I know that it works really well because (disclaimer!) I worked on the Cloud Foundry Buildpacks team for Pivotal.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#74

Post by jacques_chester »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #30

Not to be rude, but these complaints, minus the "increase" are standard Heroku practice. I see no changes-- in fact, what has changed there, anything? They're finally too expensive for you, or you outgrew them? They aren't cheap, and never have been, especially for hobbyists. If you have a hobby, you most likely have more time than money to complete your hobby, so why, why use something like Heroku? The very nature o…

> It means you're more vulnerable to your vendors quarterly earnings needs (price hikes), it means you're more vulnerable to vendor technology changes (lock-in)

So use an opensource PaaS.

I like Cloud Foundry, which I've worked on. All the IP belongs to a legally independent foundation. Some people like OpenShift, which is from Red Hat.

There's no reason to roll your own. Time spent half-building a half-PaaS is time that could be spent on developing stuff with user value.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#76

Post by joshmn »

icebraining wrote: post #71
joshmn wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Since we're listing favorites, I'm a fan of TransIP. Similar prices and plans to DO, but in my experience they offer better performance, plus they have a NAS service which makes it appealing if one needs to handle larger amounts of data (up to 400Tb). No affiliation, just a happy customer.

I hadn't heard of them until just now, but they look really sweet. I wish more companies would offer a NAS service, or a high-availability NAS service — would be nice for Gitlab instances, for example.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#77

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#78

Post by rubyn00bie »

nostrademons wrote: post #44
rubyn00bie wrote: post #30

Not to be rude, but these complaints, minus the "increase" are standard Heroku practice. I see no changes-- in fact, what has changed there, anything? They're finally too expensive for you, or you outgrew them? They aren't cheap, and never have been, especially for hobbyists. If you have a hobby, you most likely have more time than money to complete your hobby, so why, why use something like Heroku? The very nature o…

Different hobbyists have different reasons for doing their hobby. Some just want to learn new tech, any tech, and for them, learning how to deploy on a VPS is a good use of time. But others would rather focus on frontend dev - it's a hobby, after all, the point is to do what's fun - or solving problems for their friends, or learning about a market. It makes no sense for these people to worry about sysadmin stuff or d…

Well... More concisely, what I'm trying to say here is that often time we don't consider all the costs, just the monetary ones, which leave us in situations like the poster's current one.

He considered the monetary costs, but didn't think through what other costs are associated (time/stress/performance/etc) and has come out "on bottom."

It does make sense if you do a proper cost benefit analysis, to yourself, in this situation. Otherwise, he'd pay Heroku what they're "worth" and never have written this blog post.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#79

Post by deftnerd »

joshmn wrote: post #57
sotojuan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Check out LunaNode too. They're an OpenStack provider in Canada that let you not just spin up VM's, but also have your own virtual network, floating IP addresses, block storage, billing by the hour, and some other neat stuff.

I've started using them over DO & Vultr and I've been really impressed.

Re: Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

#80

Post by sanderjd »

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…

> The number of tools and resources Heroku provides is quite significant, and developing/deploying/maintaining similar solutions is certainly not cheap or easy.

This is definitely true, but I think one of the (unwritten) points of the article is that it wasn't always that way. Heroku has become more of a full-service offering, so it's understanding that they've gone a bit up-market in who they cater to, but it's a bit of a bummer for the down-market folks.

I think you're right that Dokku could be a great replacement for such people (thanks for your work!), but I hadn't seen Convox. Looks interesting, thanks for the pointer.

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