Comment by M0r13n | Hacker News Reader

Comment by M0r13n | Hacker News Reader

Are there any real alternatives to Heroku for small to medium sized projects? I am talking about projects with only one or two engineers. Those engineers likely focus on providing value for the customer by improving the actual product itself. Instead of taking care of deploying their project on AWS, which is quite complex, if you do not use it regularly.

I am myself maintaining a custom built webshop/ERP system for a local company that repairs smartphones. I barely find enough time to maintain the actual code. If I would have to dig through the weeds on AWS the project would definitely be dead right now. Instead I just "git push heroku main" and I am done. I can also provision a database or Redis through the UI, without having to worry that I made a mistake that could cost me thousands of Dollars.

Migrated a small production Node app from Heroku to Render recently due to costs and that security debacle. Render is pretty much on the same level when it comes to convenience (push-to-deploy, etc.), but they're a bit more limited in what they support. They do have some features that Heroku doesn't have. The migration took me ~1 hour altogether.

- For languages, they support less stuff than Heroku (unless you're willing to do Docker yourself).

- For DBs, they can do Postgres or Redis on their end, other stuff is on you if you need it.

- Out-of-the-box metrics don't include basic stuff such as requests-per-sec or http status codes, so you do have to plug something external in for that.

+ HTTPS on custom domain using LetsEncrypt was a breeze and free.

+ They have "disks", which is a persistent filesystem for your app. Very useful if a normal FS is better than a DB for any of your things (image processing in my case).

- render.com

- fly.dev

I'm sure there's others, these are just the ones I happen to remember at the moment.

App Platform from Digital Ocean is not as full-featured as Heroku but you can tell they are building towards parity. Good pricing and thus far no real hiccups for us in 1 year of usage.

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