Hacker News Reader

Comment by forgingahead | Hacker News Reader

Heroku has been strangely unreliable the past few weeks. Even their ticket response team has been slow, with their support engineers often talking past the issue to just send a scripted reply.

We have the majority of our client apps hosted with them, but most don't require 24/7 availability. This is still concerning though, and we do have one high-availability app hosted on them now that we're trying to plan contingencies for.

Open to any suggestions for alternatives! Ideally I'd keep things on Heroku, but it would be nice to have failsafes that could be activated relatively quickly in the event of similar issues.

View on HN

Simple dynos can be replicated with Dokku and Ledokku as a GUI. Just get an Ubuntu VM on Digitalocean, Vultr or whatever, install and configure UFW, fail2ban and automatic security updates, install dokku and you're set.

For managed databases with replication however, Dokku still leaves much to be desired...

I want a birthday cake. But first I'll be growing and milling my own grain, raising chickens and a cow. Water will be manually pumped from a well.

It is seriously not that bad at all, I would compare it to making your own cake from the flour, water, butter vs buying ready-made batter.

Heroku provides many features like pipelines and review apps that would be impossible to implement on a single VPS and very time-consuming to implement on multiple VPSes. Anyone who recommends a single VPS as a hosting solution (as lbruder did) is likely a hobbyist or a student.

Maybe it sounded a bit simplistic in the description, but running VMs /servers in the cloud/datacenter with CICD pipelines, VM patching, testing, the whole nine yards, etc is not that extreme, difficult, or ridiculous as most of us think it is (e.g. comparing it with making your own flour or growing your own coffee).

There are plenty of professionals doing it this way. Agreed that one machine would not be enough for all that, and building it will take more time, but it has its own advantages of being in control.

Curious to hear your opinion on this if you like to share.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com