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by bkovacev 1465 days ago
We do - the monthly bill was about 30k when I joined and I was able to drop it down to 15k in a month by refactoring the majority of the infra (mainly backend workers). DB is the biggest limiting factor - pricing is absolute rubbish. You can't have backups after your data size goes above 20gb. Replicas have to be on the same tier, as otherwise lag occurs daily. Connection limits are awful, but luckily you can setup a pooler in front of the DB. Also, we had workers being stuck in a limbo state, where they aren't crashed, but they aren't working either - but this mainly happens with Celery workers, to be fair. Some add-ons are also cheaper directly on their respective website, rather than through heroku.

If someone was to use heroku I'd advise to at minimum:

- move the DB elsewhere.

- not setup external services through heroku auth (sentry, logtail, newrelic etc)

With all of that said - I do have my startup and some pet projects there as it does in fact abstract the devops aspect away.

4 comments

Our database is north of 20GB and backups work fine. They made improvements to this in Jan 21, which might have improved this? https://blog.heroku.com/faster-postgres-backups
We have a:

- ~500gb one fails to backup

- ~1tb one fails to backup

- ~100gb one succesfuly backups

The link where I got that number is here - https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgres-backup...

Ours is 170Gb and backups work, but it have continues protection which is always available no matter the size of the DB, but i think OP mean dumps that he can download and store offsite
You're right, my bad! Regarding continuous protection that works flawlessly as it has saved us 2-3 times already!
Why haven't y'all moved to Render.com already? It's awesome; It's like as if Heroku never stopped innovating and much cheaper.
What does Render.com do that Heroku doesn't? (seriously asking)
In addition to what cpursley said in a sibling comment:

- http/3 (and 2)

- DDoS protection

- Mount a disk if you need persistent storage across deploys

- Secrets files (not just env vars)

- Private networking and DNS-based service discovery between your account's deployed services

Disclosure: I'm a Render Dev Advocate

I've seen Render.com pop up a lot lately on HN. Even have a pinned tab for the migration from Heroku to Render. I have some work stuff on both Heroku and EC2 (gpu instances) and a lot of side projects between both. That said I have a few questions if you dont mind.

First is there anything you think that Heroku is still better at then Render is today? Not including stuff thing might come later, but if I had to use todays stack.

I see some locations/regions but would like to know more about where the datacenters are, and how close to AWS networks they are.

What tuning options do I have for Postgres and Redis.

Thanks!

I really like the pipelines feature in Heroku. Being able to automatically deploy to a staging environment from main and then be able to promote that exact slug to production is pretty cool. I’ve yet to find a tool that has replicated that experience or something like it without getting in the weeds with Docker.

As far as I know it’s not possible to have separate environments where you’re guaranteed a bit-for-bit match going from staging to production in Render. You have to build for each environment, which if your builds are deterministic should be fine, but I’ve definitely seen that go haywire where you find out your build is in fact not deterministic in some subtle way.

Free static sites, no daily restarts, easy docker and handles distributed Elixir which is huge for us. I haven't had to touch our infrastructure for a year.
If someone was to use heroku I'd advise to at minimum: - move the DB elsewhere.

We've had a lot of success with this. Heroku Postgres didn't make much sense for something we were doing so we spun up a RDS instance in the same region since Heroku uses AWS anyway and the latency was next to nothing but with easier management, better price, better performance, etc.

I'm actually in the process of moving a large monolith from EC2 to Heroku and this is exactly what the plan is: our DB (> 10TB) is on RDS; ES, Redis also are from AWS. Third-party services aren't provisioned through the marketplace, instead straight through the vendor. Right now this is Datadog and a bug reporter.

We're extremely overprovisioned on EC2 as it is (peaking at 54GB consumed RAM over the last 12 months, and we have 386GB available) so management is welcoming the change to a bunch of Performance L dynos!

We're moving to Heroku for a variety of reasons — least of which is their recent fiasco — primarily dev exp and Pipelines/review apps (still supported!). Both will give our developers a vastly superior experience to what they had: nothing (we desperately need it).

Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM but I think people may get fired now a days for moving to heroku! Good luck! I would love to hear an update in 12 months if you are still there / heroku is still running.