Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

Re:Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend by PascalW on Monday October 19, 2015 @05:06PM (#10415753)

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 offer more advanced features, but they're much more complex and way overkill for my pet projects.

[0] http://progrium.viewdocs.io/dokku/ [1] http://deis.io/ [2] https://flynn.io/

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Re:Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend by sotojuan on Monday October 19, 2015 @05:32PM (#10415933)

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

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Re:Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend by joshmn on Monday October 19, 2015 @06:24PM (#10416208)

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.

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Re:Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend by deftnerd on Monday October 19, 2015 @07:21PM (#10416465)

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.

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Re:Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend by icebraining on Monday October 19, 2015 @07:07PM (#10416404)

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.

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Re:Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend by joshmn on Monday October 19, 2015 @07:18PM (#10416451)

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.

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Re:Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend by zacharybk on Tuesday October 20, 2015 @09:16AM (#10418899)

Hey Joshmn!

Zach here, Director of Support at DigitalOcean. Thanks for raising a few concerns.

I'm going to shoot you an email to learn more about what's not going right for you.

Best, Zach

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Re:Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend by jamiepenney on Monday October 19, 2015 @05:34PM (#10415955)

How big is the VPS you're running it on? I've got a 1GB Digital Ocean box for my side projects already, wondering if I should just spin up another one of those with Dokku instead.

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Re:Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend by savant on Monday October 19, 2015 @05:54PM (#10416077)

We normally recommend at least 1GB (and tell users to run swap on smaller instances). It's really just dependent upon your app's memory usage, and you can use docker options to limit app resources quite easily :)

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Re:Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend by PascalW on Tuesday October 20, 2015 @12:22AM (#10417418)

I'm running it on 2GB but it really depends on your apps how much memory you'll need.

Dokku itself has no running processes, it's just Docker and nginx which are both pretty light on resources.

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Re:Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend by cynix on Monday October 19, 2015 @06:55PM (#10416356)

If only these things supported FreeBSD…

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Re:Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend by felixgallo on Monday October 19, 2015 @07:43PM (#10416558)

you don't need those things if you have freebsd, because you already have jails and, e.g., https://github.com/iocage/iocage .

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Re:Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend by cynix on Monday October 19, 2015 @08:21PM (#10416709)

Thanks. I've been using ezjail, but will take a look at iocage. What I really want, though, is the Heroku-style push-to-deploy workflow that things like Dokku seems to offer.

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