[savant]

A reasonable option for hobbyists is Dokku[1], a single-server heroku clone. I'm also pretty excited about Convox[2], and would definitely recommend that early adopters check it out.

I get that people are frustrated with heroku's pricing, but at the end of the day I think that if your side project isn't worth the money you spend on it's hosting, maybe you should look into other side projects? If it's truly not a money-making project, not needing to scale it or have it up 24/7 seems like a reasonable trade-off to not paying for it's hosting.

The number of tools and resources Heroku provides is quite significant, and developing/deploying/maintaining similar solutions is certainly not cheap or easy. Especially at scale.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the Dokku maintainers.

  - [1] http://progrium.viewdocs.io/dokku/
  - [2] http://convox.com/

[mr_luc]

Convox and Otto are occupying similar spaces (with Empire being vaguely similar). Otto has the immutable infrastructure powers of Terraform to fall back on, (not to mention Consul, Vault and Packer), and at v0.0.1 already supports deploying apps to clouds other than Amazon (and has as lower fixed cost for deploying simple apps, because apps using the simple recipe don't need private registries etc, so the only real non-app fixed cost in the simple case is storage of built AMIs).

However, Convox is built to do something considerably more focused, and doesn't have to worry about eg its infrastructure setup bits being usable as a separate product yet ... and it shows in the sophistication of what they've put together in such a short time, like the Postgresql, Redis and Papertrail services. Likewise, though Otto is slated to integrate with Nomad (for containers as a deployment unit), it doesn't yet, and only supports AMIs.

Who wins? We do! I am very, very happy that there's such active innovation happening in this space.

[sanderjd]

> The number of tools and resources Heroku provides is quite significant, and developing/deploying/maintaining similar solutions is certainly not cheap or easy.

This is definitely true, but I think one of the (unwritten) points of the article is that it wasn't always that way. Heroku has become more of a full-service offering, so it's understanding that they've gone a bit up-market in who they cater to, but it's a bit of a bummer for the down-market folks.

I think you're right that Dokku could be a great replacement for such people (thanks for your work!), but I hadn't seen Convox. Looks interesting, thanks for the pointer.

[cynix]

Any plans for FreeBSD support?

[savant]

We largely just orchestrate docker - there is a bit of glue around nginx of course - but I don't see why we couldn't support FreeBSD.

Arguably the biggest blocker is actually getting a running BSD instance - I'm going to say I've never successfully installed FreeBSD, though the last time I tried was 10+ years ago - and then potentially creating a `docker` binary that uses Jails but responds as if it's docker.

As it's open source, I definitely wouldn't mind helping someone investigate FreeBSD support :)

EDIT: Looks like there is already docker on FreeBSD, https://wiki.freebsd.org/Docker . I assume you guys have bash, so this should more or less work...

[lexcorvus]

Correcting grammar and spelling errors—especially in public—is always a tough call: upon judging that an error is systematic and not a simple typo, do you help the writer avoid the error in perpetuity—even if it embarrasses them a little, and even if you'll probably get downvoted for being pedantic or offtopic? In this case, I've determined the downsides are worth the possibility of sparing the author a lifetime of error. So, without further ado:

    s/it's hosting/its hosting/g

[cwbrandsma]

There is a whole lot of "I'm an asshole" conveyed in that statement of yours.

[lexcorvus]

Everything in my statement is genuine. What's more impolite, saying something, or letting someone continue to make a mistake? Like I said in my comment, it's a tough call.

Implying someone is an asshole is always impolite. Take that as you will.

[nostrademons]

A lot of people know full well the difference between "its" and "it's", but dash off HN comments because they have something contribute but not a lot of time. I've been known to forget whole verbs when writing out my comments, for example. That doesn't mean that they're fated to a lifetime of always getting it wrong: the parent comment you corrected used "it's" correctly once and incorrectly twice, and uses "its" correctly in his comment history.

The other commenters are asking you to please consider carelessness rather incompetence as a motive, and to see the forest for the trees. If everybody corrected grammar in the comments, we'd quickly see the site switch from substantive discussion to useless pedantry. Don't be that guy.

[dontscale]

You don't need to give lexcorvus a hard time. Isn't it evident from his/her personality that he/she has enough of those already?

[mtmail]

The author's email address is in his HN profile (one click away). If you truely wanted to help the author you could have done it in private. I agree with the other users who replied.

[lexcorvus]

I always prefer to correct in private. Most people don't list email addresses in their profiles, so I didn't think to check. Next time I will.

By the way, despite logic, "truly" doesn't contain the substring "true", so "truely" is a misspelling. Your email address, unfortunately, isn't in your profile (and nor could I find it via opencagedata.com), so I hope (though doubt) you'll forgive a public correction.

[PaulHoule]

Funny, but for run of the mill text written by humans you almost always improve things by running

s/it's/its/

[lexcorvus]

Indeed often true; I've noticed the same. In this case, there was a correct use of "it's", so I had to add an extra word to the substitution.

[meepmorp]

It's incredible what a complete ass you are.

[lexcorvus]

Everything I wrote is genuine and polite (perhaps even overly so). What you wrote is distinctly impolite. Is the irony lost on you? Think of that the next time you're tempted to call someone a nasty name.