[jrochkind1]

I've been spending some time looking at moving to heroku, but having trouble figuring out how to use it for a real production for deploy for "only" a couple hundred dollars a month.

Is that what you're doing? "Standard" dynos and just a few of them are working for you, I assume, for that budget? In my tests, with a Rails app, "standard" dynos are looking surprisingly slow, possibly unacceptably so. Very curious to hear about other people's heroku formations if anyone wants to share. What platform you're on (Rails or something else), and what your response times look like, would also be interesting.

[dyeje]

Checkout Hatchbox.io, just started using it myself. You basically pay a flat monthly rate for their Heroku-esque management service and then pay for the servers on your provider of choice separately (e.g. DO, AWS, etc).

[jrochkind1]

Are you finding it mature enough to "just work"? The reason someone pays for something like heroku is they put a high value on "just work", I am really not looking to be troubleshooting weird bugs or figuring out weird edge cases in my ops, that's the whole point here!

I'll take a look, it definitely looks interesting, thanks!

[dyeje]

Hard to say because I've only been using it for a week, but so far it has just worked (which is what I am looking for as well, I don't have the time or patience for anything less).

[lambda_obrien]

I've been looking for something between Heroku (too expensive, too many features) and Dokkku (too much hassle, I have to maintain my own security and patches) and this looks like exactly the thing I wanted, except it looks like it's only for Ruby? I use a combination of Python, Elixir, and Haskell, so I'd love it if they did support other langs.

[cpursley]

Take a look at digitaloceans new app platform or render.com. Render allows you to run distributed Elixir, which is nice. And with digitalocean, if you outgrow app platform you could just move to their hosted k8s.

These both are k8s under the hood but with everything extracted away to a heroku level, but much cheaper. Additionally, they both provide static site hosting like netlify.

[cldellow]

With a standard dyno, you get something like 1/15th of a core on the underlying EC2 instance. IMO, they're best for workers where latency isn't an issue.

For user-facing work, I use performance dynos.

Heroku _is_ expensive, but in exchange, you don't have to worry much at all about the ops side of things.

YMMV, it may not be suitable if you need to be profitable each month and can't afford to spend the baseline cost of, say, $1,000/month.

[jrochkind1]

Thanks. I agree that heroku is an amazing service, a really impressive product.

But once you are using a single performance dyno, you are unlikely looking at a bill that's only "couple hundred dollars a month".

Thanks for confirming you use performance dynos for user-facing stuff -- I thought I was going insane discovering that it didn't look like standard dynos were suitable for that for me -- is "everyone else" using them though? The heroku docs imply they are indeed... standard (that's the name), and the performance dynos are for unusual performance needs.

Which is not what it was looking like to me.

Based on my current investigations, I agree being prepared to spend $1000/month is a better back of the napkin to-start-with estimate.

Which, sure, is quite possibly still a value compared to the number of hours you'd be spending setting up and maintaning something else. Quite possibly! But it's not "a couple hundred dollars a month".