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Comment by PascalW | Hacker News Reader

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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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 :)

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.

If only these things supported FreeBSD…

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

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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