Hacker News Reader

Comment by franciscop | Hacker News Reader

I love Heroku and everything they are doing, it's doubtless a push forward for the web as a whole. However, the pricing for hobby sites (including SSL) is crazy from a personal point of view so I'm slowly moving my projects out of it [1][2]. I wish they had some kind of "Hobby Bundle".

[1] http://umbrellajs.com/ [2] http://picnicss.com/

View on HN

Check out Red Hat's Openshift Online [1] if you haven't already. They offer 3 Gears for free, each with 512 MB Ram, 1 GB Disk space (install e.g Postgres into one gear and you have a DB with 1 GB) and you can use Lets Encrypt with their Bronze plan (which is free if you only use the 3 free gears). Depending on what your hobby sites do this could be enough.

[1] https://www.openshift.com/pricing/

If you are OK with running a >3 year old version of Postgres, that is.

Other than that, openshift is nice, though, I agree.

Yes, would be nice if they could upgrade the version of some of the dbs/languages/etc. they support. As a user I could write my own cartridge to support a newer version of Postgres (like I did for Playframework 2.4+), but then I lose the automatic updates and have to update the gear myself.

btw: it seems you still can't automate the cert renewal for let's encrypt on openshift online.[1]

[1] https://openshift.uservoice.com/forums/258655-ideas/suggesti...

I am a longtime Heroku customer on an Enterprise service plan at the moment. I brought this up to my sales rep last time he checked in.

I explained how we moved a bunch of smaller sites to S3, reluctantly because I really like having a unified platform for all our sites. But even though (or perhaps precisely because) we are spending thousands of dollars a month with Heroku, I find the $20/month SSL charge insulting. SSL is not an option anymore.

The good news is, the sales rep said this has come up a lot, they hear us, and to "stay tuned".

Sounds like a sales rep.

They were saying the same thing when we left 2 years ago.

Their pricing for hobby sites is 7$ + 10$ DB, which is very comparable with a self setup IaaS like DO and AWS. Personally I think the developer experience is much better on Heroku and quite worth it.

SSL is a pain point, though I do empathize with them - I think they're doing something expensive for that. What I do is to use AWS Cloudfront and ACM for a free cert and site speedup - if they are personal projects the CF bill ought to be in the low few dollars anyway.

The $7 is comparable to one app per DO or AWS micro/nano server. So Heroku wins on convenience.

If you have say 10 apps then Heroku costs 10*$7, but you might still only have used 1-3 servers depending on memory use of apps etc so then Heroku looses on cost.

Naturally I got a total mix of quite a few on Heroku's classic or new free plan, some on their hobby plan, some on AWS, some on docker cloud, most proxied behind a SSL certificate running on AWS..... (https://flurdy.com/docs/letsencrypt/nginx.html)

Yeah, but I started with PHP I could just choose among many hosting companies for 5-10$/month and you get your shared space with unlimited domains, which was perfectly suited for my needs at that point. Of course as I learned more, Node and the such I needed better technology and that's why I moved to Heroku. So I'd love to see a "shared hosting for heroku" or similar. I think it will happen given some time, when the Node.js environment stabilizes more and more big players come.

DO has 5$ + VAT price for 512MB instance. I have no problem accommodating mysql + web on that.

+ 7$ for a worker I think.

It looks like those are static sites. Why host them on Heroku? You could stick them on GitHub Pages [1] for free.

[1] https://pages.github.com/

The S3 Free Tier can be a good alternative as well. https://aws.amazon.com/s3/

Even off the free tier, S3 + Cloudfront is now my static host of choice. Incredibly cheap for my low traffic side projects and free (and instant) SSL certificate setup.

AWS free tier is free for 12 months only. Its basically a "new customer" special. Github pages is not time limited.

now they are static sites built with grunt. Before they were dynamic so the documentation and tests could be joined and runned dynamically. Now I just do that before push, which had me change the organization of few things. I converted them and I'm now hosting them in Github Pages for that same reason. I learned a lot about grunt, phantomjs and SSL with cloudflare on the process though, so I'm happy with the result.

There will be news on this front soon; stay tuned.

I host most of my sites on Github pages (Free) and Ruby / Go / Elixir / nodejs projects on DigitalOcean. I also host various logging/analytics/mailing services on DigitalOcean without paying saas services. Total is very reasonable

And what awesome projects those are. Thank you!

Thanks :)

If you have multiple applications though - it's possible to use one ssl terminator per domain.

One option for HTTPS is to just stick CloudFlare in front of it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com