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by mst 1231 days ago
A service can run in a state of if not benevolent, then at least ambivalent, neglect for quite some time without it being a disaster for the users.

I would suggest you start poking around at possible alternatives just in case, but not as yet with any great sense of urgency.

If you Ctrl-F for crunchydata in this comment section you'll find an employee of theirs talking about their postgres hosting and listing a bunch of services their customer use for the other parts of the puzzle, and have hired enough heavyweight core contributors and active and clueful community members that I think it's reasonable to say they're -good- at postgres.

I would say that what I expect to be most likely to happen is gradually increasing prices and gradually degrading service (the people still working on it do seem to care but I don't know if there are enough of them left to avoid bitrot setting in and even if there are today, in a year or two there may not be) so having a plan to move in an orderly fashion but not executing it yet seems like the wise approach.

Neither panicking and moving in a fast and risky way now, nor waiting until (if it happens) things go from aggravating to actively intolerable and moving in a fast and risky way then, are likely to be particularly good ideas.

OTOH, being prepared to migrate elsewhere in an olderly fashion if the cost/benefit calculations tell you it's time, re-running those calculations and double checking your plan every so often, and continuing to enjoy the service in the mean time, seems like a reasonable, responsible, and overall relatively pleasant way forwards.

(disclaimer: I am not a Heroku user myself, but I think the general principles almost certainly apply here just fine, and I'd certainly be comfortable giving the same advice to a consultancy client at work, so without being foolish enough to claim I'm definitely right I'd suggest the above analysis is at least worthy of giving serious consideration to)

1 comments

Luckily I keep to basic ways of hosting things, so if the time comes to move, I should be able to. Replicated NodeJS web backend with a Postgres DB is gonna be supported in tons of places. No special logging, just stdout. Some cronjobs an outbound HTTPS requests, that's typical. The most unusual thing I do is open an SSH tunnel to some Linux server if there's a special long-running process I need to call RPCs on.