Hacker News Reader

Comment by berkes | Hacker News Reader

I'm hearing a lot of love for fly.io. But what about render.com? They are another serious contender, if I believe their own marketing (which I don't really, ever).

View on HN

I'm hosting a few sites on Render and have been pretty happy with them so far.

Getting a Rails site up and running on them isn't quite as turnkey as what Heroku offers, but it still only took me a few hours to migrate one site composed of a Rails app server, Sidekiq+Redis job processor, and PG database, and that included puzzling through some lesser-explained parts of their documentation.

I really appreciate the fact that their prices scale mostly linearly, as opposed to Heroku's utterly indefensible pricing practices.

Render is still a fairly new company, which explains many of the feature gaps and lightness of their documentation, but I think they're well worth considering as a Heroku replacement. I have no regrets about making the switch.

Heroku offers seamless integration with a bunch of services with free tiers, like logging, error monitoring etc.

Many of these services no longer offer free tiers apart from their heroku-specific integrations.

For tiny startup this makes a difference.

Does Render offer anything like this?

I use Rollbar for error monitoring and they still have a free tier even when divorced from Heroku. So does Papertrail.

I use Amazon SES for mail-sending because I have issues with all of the Heroku free tier products. I think I might pay a dollar or two for this each month.

Render offers a managed Redis product with a free tier.

I haven't had need for anything else, so ymmv.

These pretty much cover it for me, too. Thank you.

I try to keep such coupling to a minimum, though. Only when the alternative to a `heroku add ..` is really hard, I prefer to have a much more flexible SOME_SAAS_KEY env var and use that in my app/adapters rather than having heroku shoehorn it in. Because the latter only ever ties me further into Heroku.

Which, following YAGNI, may not be an issue today, but does make your agility and ability to react to market changes (such as alternatives being a better option) much less. I try to keep my software platform agnostic because any tight coupling will haunt me in future.

Haha, for what it's worth, I'm the lead for their marketing, and also an eng who took the job because I loved using Render and wanted a change from working in DevOps.

You don't have to believe me...would expect nothing less : D the product and the way we ship what our users want speaks for itself.

Tell your CEO I love you guys and you make my and the life of my engineers very easy. I hope you continue to grow and add customers to your roster.

Your comment made the CEO's day. CEO very happy.

Thanks for the reply. Very much appreciated.

I'm about to move our tiny startup off AWS, onto NextPAASPlatform and had both fly and render shortlisted. The latter just bumped a few notches higher.

FWIW: I'm moving off AWS because it is expensive in many ways: it's costing me dear time which I should spend on my product. And it's costing serious baseline costs: Just a CI pipeline, building a static site, a react app, and deploying a Ruby (not rails) backend to Beanstalk Staging and Production costs over $100/month. Before any traffic and scaling. And building and maintaining it costs me upwards of 90 hours now. I consider this wasted investments.

My story’s similar to @dnilasor’s sibling comment except with a little twist. I’m a Dev Advocate at Render now but used to be a Dev Advocate at Heroku.

I’m very excited about the potential future of Render.

I'm currently on Heroku (want to get off it!), and the main thing that's keeping me from trying out Render is the lack of point in time recovery for Postgres. Having had to use it once on Heroku it's an absolute life saver, I would be nervous of not having it. Does Render have any plans to implement a Postgress WAL point in time recovery/restore feature?

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgres-rollba...

https://render.com/docs/databases#backups

You're not alone! Here's where we're tracking that feature request: https://feedback.render.com/features/p/add-point-in-time-rec...

Upvote if it's what you are looking for. Leave a comment if you'd like to share more context or your needs are slightly different.

Thanks, done and done. As I said over on my comment at the above link it is one of those features that if you have every had to use it you cant live without it. I hope I would never have to use it but need it to be there just in case we screwup!

One of the things I have loved about Heroku is that once you have an account and have the CLI installed, you can create and deploy apps entirely through the CLI. You don't ever have to visit the Heroku dashboard during the initial deployment process.

Is this possible at all on Render? I haven't gone through the process on Render yet, but it looks like it requires a visit to the site at some point for each project that you want to deploy.

This is correct, but a Render CLI is planned: https://feedback.render.com/features/p/render-cli

If you have the time, please share in that thread what you love most about using CLIs for services like Heroku or Render.

Also, we just released a public API which was a dependency for the CLI.

- API announcement: https://render.com/blog/winter-release-new-features#an-api-f...

- API docs: https://render.com/docs/api

a good alternative to heroku that i use for all my personal or side projects is dokku. Think of it as an open source on-prem heroku

https://dokku.com/

In my recent experience, heroku is still much easier to deploy. I've tried render.com a few times with a pretty basic rails 7 internal app and I haven't been able to get a successfully deploy.

This is a bug we need to fix right away! Any chance you could email me (address in profile) details?

+1 for fly.io

If only because they have faster dynos? It's way easier to get started on Heroku than any other cloud service thing. Even AWS Beanstalk is just horrible. You're constantly fucking around with configuration.

Also, get rid of Webpacker. That shit will drive you nuts.

idk, I might consider my self slightly biased because I like the fly.io team, but fly.io has a really simple story for deploying docker images. It'll build them for you, host them, give you secure ssh access, handle connecting to other instances via nice "friendly" names...

I ran several things in Heroku and besides having a point-and-click Postgres product and add-ons Fly can run your app pretty easily. Unless those are the things which you mean that make Heroku super simple.

The automated ssl cert generation is pretty cool. Although certbot works just as well honestly. I'm going to give fly.io a try soon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com