[nicoburns]

> But despite how much I want to learn the fly.io platform – it has been a bit tricky for me wrap my head around a good use-case for this type of distributed hosting service.

Worth noting that you don't have to use the distributed aspect. I have my site hosted on a single one of a fly.io's smallest instances (which one can get 3 of for free), and even like this the performance is excellent (50ms response times), and it doesn't have the problem of spinning down when not in use like Heroku's free tier.

It's nice to at least get a choice of regions. For example, the company I work for (not hosted on fly.io currently) only has customers in the UK and Ireland. So it's would be to be able to pop our servers there with a simple config setting.

[petercooper]

Same. I'm really impressed with the experience on there now that I finally spent a day trying it out. The geodistribution stuff had no interest to me so I'd avoided them till now, but it's really the underlying tooling and experience that has won me over.

[hartleybrody]

This is an excellent point. While their main value prop seems to be "servers closer to your users" you could also just use them as a drop-in replacement for something like heroku and just use one region to simplify the mental model, pricing and orchestration.