Hacker News Reader

I haven't kept up with it in years, so I'm not sure it's still the status quo.

Dokku is fine and is great at what it does - running an Heroku-like on your own hosted server. I ran a hobby project for over a year without any serious problems on top of a cheap Digital Ocean droplet.

It doesn't really have a story for when you want to scale up though - for example moving to multiple web servers behind a load balancer with your databases on some other vms. So it's great for side projects and demos, less so for anything you want to run in serious production mode.

I would like to avoid the case where I have to manage the ops on my own.

I would recommend trying dokku for thirty minutes. It's incredibly easy and once you use it you'll be a convert. I almost never do any maintenance and run dozens of services. All for the price of a VPS. It's very powerful and very inexpensive.

And by the way, dokku has support for cron jobs and everything else you indicated, all for free. Dozens of plugins that support every database. Git push almost any app and it will detect and build, just like heroku. It's so good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com