[mark_l_watson]

A good article, except for one big thing: this is not an end user, rather a direct competitor. Public articles that criticize competitors always run me the wrong way.

I haven't used Heroku in a few years, but it has served (using the Hobby plan) as a really low cost way to host web apps.

I have been reading through the comments on alternative providers, and even though I haven't used it, GCP's Cloud Deploy looks interesting also (a very long time ago, I used AppEngine a fair amount).

[vmception]

Check Netlify

Or Vercel

Best scaling in their free plans

Heroku hobby is a joke in comparison and hasnt been updated in a decade while all their addons have gotten less and less featured while costing more and more

I host all my static assets on IPFS which practically nullifies the bandwidth limits of Netlify

[lambdaba]

Could you elaborate on how you use IPFS? How fast is it? Do you use use a pinning service?

[vmception]

I upload static assets to IPFS and add those static links to my project instead of having an "assets" folder.

IPFS is fast enough, I had these concerns too so I use a gateway for links as some of them cache files on their own CDN, for free.

Yes, I use a pinning service, I was extremely hesitant as many of them are just SaaS hosting like Pinata is and charge by bandwidth used, but there are free ones like https://web3.storage which for some reason is combining Filecoin and IPFS together for each upload and liveness/pinning.

Ironically, Pinata also acts as a gateway and can then be used for free if you want. But there are other gateways. Cloudfront has one but what it decides to cache is strange.

[krthr]

GCP Cloud Build + Cloud Run is a pretty good alternative for Heroku

[leodriesch]

Render.com is pretty great and they recently introduced free plans for Hobby usage.

Supports web services, static sites and Postgres/Redis.

[killingtime74]

Dosen’t criticising competitors increase competition? “We taste better than x”, “we have higher quality than x”, “we’re like x but cheaper?”

[elondaits]

I don’t like this either. I think maybe people are more used to this in the US, but I personally think that if you can’t be objective you need to be more humble in your communication.

… of course Coke can trash-talk Pepsi and vice-versa… but if I’m making a technical assessment of competing products or software platforms I get a bad feeling of anyone using those sales tactics.

[jwogrady]

Yeah, but who we protecting? Don't readers want a rigorous debate? Are we pirates or diplomats?

[sdoering]

In Germany there are, for examples, rules regarding comparative advertising. Way stronger than anything the US has. Therefore we are not used to competitors trash talking other brands in ads.

So I am in the same boat when it comes to SEO/content marketing like this. It is advertising, nothing more.

And personally, when evaluating products, I agree with OP. I also like the people behind a product to be a bit more humble when comparing themselves to competitors.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

That can be true, especially for objective facts, but I would expect such criticism to be biased to the point of unreliability - "We taste better than x (according to our staff)", "we have higher quality than x (at double the price)", "we’re like x but cheaper (and we have nearly 20% of their features)". And even then, as an input there can be value, but it's helpful to at least know that it's coming from a competitor so I can anticipate the bias.