Genuine question, who even uses Heroku anymore?
A VPS (hetzner, etc) + managed postgres DB (supabase / AWS / etc) or a local one might more more than enough these days.
A VPS (hetzner, etc) + managed postgres DB (supabase / AWS / etc) or a local one might more more than enough these days.
We were getting close to one of the big jumps on the standard pricing of Heroku Postgres, and we would have had to basically double our monthly cost to lift the max data we could store from 1.5TB to 2.0TB. On Crunchy Data, that additional disk space will be like 1% more rather than 100% more.
While investigating Crunchy, I ran some benchmarks, and I found Crunchy Bridge Postgres to be running 3X faster than Heroku Postgres.
Heroku seems to be working on some interesting new things, but I feel burned by the subpar performance and lack of basically any new features over many years. I don't know if the new Aurora-based database will be faster than Crunchy, but the benchmarks they're talking about sound like they're finally about to catch them. But we also have better features on Crunchy, too, such as logical replication. Logical replication is still not available on Heroku.
The experience for deploying apps and having add-ons is still pretty easy, but we'll see how that improves. HTTP2 support is still in beta.
I settled up on AWS ECS :)
My main issue with Heroku was that they have not changed anything in _years_. No support for gRPC, no IPv6, and simple VPC peering costs $1200 a month.
They just shipped HTTP/2 terminated at their router [0], and have it on their roadmap [1] to support HTTP/2 all the way through. But it seems like it's at minimum a few months off.
(As for VPC peering: the moment you need that, it sorta feels like Heroku is no longer the right place to be, even ignoring the costs.)
[0] https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-http2-public-beta [1] https://github.com/orgs/heroku/projects/130
I also moved my app hosting to NorthFlank from Heroku and have been really happy with that as well. It’s got the features I always wanted on Heroku (simple things like grouping different types of instances together into projects really helps) plus again excellent responsive support.
Would strongly recommend them to anyone looking to move off Heroku.
I got to talk to someone who was intelligent about Postgres, who answered various questions I had, who offered a few pieces of insight that I wouldn't have thought, etc.
Compared to every single support interaction I've ever had with Heroku for 10 years, and this was light years more friendly, informative, and productive.
I am so happy we're switching. Way to go Crunchy!
Despite interesting competition, my feeling is that the Heroku of 2024 remains... Heroku.
I feel this way even though -- depending on how you segment -- the list of "interesting" competitors is quite long at this point: Render, Railway, Northflank, Fly.io, Vercel, DO App Platform, etc.
It's crazy how the ergonomic still just aren't there.
(And: bugs. I'm also surprised by the kinds of issues I run into on some of those sites in my list -- problems that, even if not show-stopping, feel like revealing indicators of quality.)
Any specifics/examples? I find it hard to imagine those "big name" companies/platforms you just mentioned don't have entire teams dedicated to hyper-optimizing experience.
That said it does feel a bit like a ghost town, I'm always happy to hear when someone is doing something over there.
That was very surprising to me. Most businesses that are willing to pay 2x for an HA database are probably NOT likely to be ok with that kind of data loss risk.
(AWS and GCP's HA database offerings use synchronous replication.)
If you wanted to spend money on something else, circleci and others help manage ci/cd as well.
But I spent several hours fighting with a DNS change, trying to host my marketing website as Cloudflare pages site from my root domain (with DNS managed by Cloudflare), and then wildcard subdomains routed to a Render server. I couldn't get it to work no matter what configs I tried. My root domain marketing site is proxied through Cloudflare and I was trying to get the wildcard subdomains as DNS-only, and I suspect this was the problem but idk. In other words, the Cloudflare pages marketing site is https://bookhead.net and I wanted my customer's subdomains to route to the Render server like https://forlornbooks.bookhead.net/ (I still get the error since I haven't finished my migration to Heroku). The subdomains worked with no problem until I tried to setup a separate marketing site at the root domain.
Also, I had a hard time setting up SSH with a containerized server. It was a weird DX that was a bit confusing to document so I can remember later. Can only imagine how confusing it might be if I ever have teammates. The Render CLI looks promising, though.
These are only the most recent issues. Seems like y'all improved the headaches I ran into the time I tried.