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Comment by shostack | Hacker News Reader

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 with my Rails Tutorial app.

That said, as I now am at the point of starting to work on projects that I hope to one day be public facing, 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.

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> 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.

Out of the box OpenShift has a variety of languages and frameworks as well as ProstgreSQL, MySQL, and MongoDB database options (plus custom cartridges). You get three free gears (i.e. containers) so up to 3 small apps.

I've only used it to create a small Python/Flask app http://wwos-bitmason.rhcloud.com/ but there are lots of examples and information on the OpenShift blog.

[Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat.]

I've used OpenShift and it's pretty straightforward to use. I don't feel like it's as easy to use as Heroku, but it got the job done. If I left my app idle (I think for 24 hrs or more), I noticed that it took awhile for it to awake when I tried to access it again.

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.

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?

Are there any ways to be hit by surprise charges on Bronze? I'm assuming setting up a ping via the New Relic trick people used on Heroku is sufficient.

Also, for a relative novice, how easy is it to get a Rails or Sinatra app up and running?

My concern longer-term is that Openshift would go the same route as Heroku. Is there anything about their business model that might indicate that's not a major risk?

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.

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.

How easy is it to migrate your database, app, addons and configuration from Heroku to Bluemix? I'm going to consider a new host once Heroku ends it's grandfathered prices on Feb 1, 2016.

I'd recommend Pivotal Web Services[0], aka PWS, aka "p-dubs", buuuut that's only because I work for the company running it :)

If you have a 12-factor app that pulls config from the environment, it should ideally not be too traumatic. Services are meant to be injected by the platform.

Apps should be the easiest part. Of the buildpacks: Ruby, Python and Node are based on Heroku's and are very nearly identical. Go is based on a community buildpack, PHP is a complete ground-up rewrite and Java is a ground-up rewrite maintained by the Spring team.

If you signup for PWS and you find things broken or missing, email me: jchester@pivotal.io, and I will find who can help you.

[0] http://run.pivotal.io/

Note that, for some reason, they limit regions that can use their paid tiers. So, you can't use them if you're in third world countries like Australia or New Zealand.

This was making the rounds a while ago as half DIY half managed: http://convox.com

+1 Convox is worth looking at. Fully open source, feature-rich and leverages AWS&Docker instead of reinventing the wheel.

Docker originally came from DotCloud, which was basically the same concept/underlying services as this. It was amazing. I never understood why someone would want to use Heroku instead. I haven't used it since they sold that business, but I'm excited to use Convox.

> 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.

Unless you've got a whole lot of them, paying $7 to Heroku is probably still your best bet. Especially if you're already familiar with the ecosystem.

INM Bluemix has a very generous free tier. You can run two or three low memory Sinatra apps for free. It is a cool system. I also line AWS and Microsoft Azure, depending on what I am doing.

AWS. Elastic Beanstalk has pretty similar easy command line tools, and their free tier gives enough for one instance each of ec2, s3, rds and will mostly autoconfigure like heroku does.

Since I'm not at all confident in my abilities to secure things properly yet, am I at any risk of racking up a massive bill from a hacked account if I go with the AWS free tier? Or is that simply not a possibility?

Enable two factor auth on your AWS account. Chances of fraud quickly approach zero unless your AWS API creds are leaked. You should always be using an IAM account that has only the privileges your application requires.

It's possible. Security on AWS can certainly be tricky. It's safer to use ElasticBeanstalk if you don't feel confident in your security knowledge, since it manages keys and IAM roles for you.

Free tier is only for 12 months, and then it gets very expensive - t2 micro instance is 10 USD a month, so that's 20 USD a month with one ec2 and one rds instance.

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