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Comment by reidjs | Hacker News Reader

If you feel trapped in Heroku or Netlify and you have a somewhat technical background I wrote an article recently on how to escape them using a DO droplet and Nginx. $200 a month seems high to me for what it is.

https://medium.com/@reid.sherman/deploying-and-configuring-a...

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I'd like to switch platforms but I'm SO fast and comfortable with Heroku.

Change costs for me might be high. I'd rather spend time on marketing / features that could get me 3 more customers/month to make up for it...

I learned Heroku at my coding boot camp and they have made thousands of $$ off of me since...

Agreed, I've been using Heroku about 8 years now for my solo SaaS business. The most I've ever done in dev-ops is restarting a server and upgrading postgres versions. However, paying around $800/mo, I do fantasize sometimes on switching to AWS. Honestly I wouldn't even know where to start, and likely not a good use of time. For Heroku, I'd like to see HTTP/2 support, automated wildcard certs, and another Performance dyno option.

If you want an in-between I'm a huge fan of DigitalOcean. Fantastic documentation, better support in my experience, all in all more welcoming to the 'middle-guy.' Totally understand that it's probably not a great use of your time to switch over if your margins can afford 800/mo with ease.

DigitalOcean certainly is great, I'm using it too, but it's still far more work running your stuff there vs Heroku.

Start with Dokku

$200/mo sounds like a lot, but you have to realize your solution also incurs some serious operational/mental costs esp when you have more than one project. Where every successive project you develop does thing slightly different as you improve, and every time you ssh into a given project server you go `cat ~/README.md` to remember all the idiosyncrasies with this specific project and its deployment. And you still don't have a solution for things like logging and piping logs to a service like PaperTrail. And your deploys have downtime, and if you have a zero-downtime solution you will likely have to debug it here and there, or figure out why your rollback broke.

How many people running their own DO droplet even have a convenient way

One of the main perks of Heroku that makes it worth the cost imo is having a standard way to do everything whether you have one or 100 projects. You certainly don't have to go all the way in either, you can use Heroku just for your app servers and then host the rest of your infra on AWS like your DB (RDS).

Dokku is a great self-hosted alternative as well.

I am very glad that I started with and maintain simple servers that act simply as computers connected to the internet. I understand more clearly how it works and can make more informed decisions on when and why more managed services can benefit me.

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