Do you guys still use Heroku?

Question

Hey guys and girls, do you still use Heroku? I know they were hot like 5, 10 years ago but I'm not sure if that's true now?

Thanks a bunch,
Tom

Andrzej Winecki · Accepted Answer

Take a look at https://fly.io/ and https://render.com/ if you want a good PaaS.

At my company, we've just recently completed a full migration off Heroku (to AWS). Heroku was cool some years ago, but imo they just began stagnating at some point. Perhaps when Salesforce bought them :D.

Heroku is ridiculously expensive, and is painful to use with Docker containers. I've had issues with networking, building Docker images, and many other things.

Cat Stickler · Answer

I can't express how utterly disappointed I am that this isn't an RPG. It sounds like an epic Legend of Zelda spin-off where you play as the Great Deku Tree 😹

Mike Kasberg · Answer

No, no more free tier and way overpriced!

I installed Dokku on a server from Hetzner, it provides a similar experience with only a little extra initial setup required!

Kamal is probably also worth looking into.

Lis D · Answer

We use fly.io on a number of projects and like it - easy and cheap to get started :)

Tom Mikulin · Answer

I'm a DevOps guy so I just use k8s cause I know it by heart now :), but for someone new those are probably better options...although k3s is also a god option...

Charlie Revett · Answer

The only reason to use Heroku in 2024 is because you're a big org with a legacy system deployed to it, which would cost a tonne to migrate. 

I run everything on https://railway.app, their platform and the team are great. 

https://fly.io is also a good modern alternative.

Jason Leow · Answer

$23 per month

Mike Kasberg · Answer

I think Dokku is probably best if you want to deploy several side-projects to a single server. Kamal is probably better if you have a serious project that want to deploy to multiple servers.

Mike Kasberg · Answer

Removed in 2022. https://help.heroku.com/RSBRUH58/removal-of-heroku-free-product-plans-faq

Dokku and Kamal are great for Rails! Especially since Rails 7+ provides a Dockerfile by default.

Dokku is an open source thing based on the way Heroku used to work (git push to deploy). Kamal is an open source tool from DHH & 37 Signals, they're using it to deploy their production apps. Version 2 just came out at Rails World.

Jason Leow · Answer

I still use it. I use the cheapest tier, plus Postgres add-on. It does the job, although every month there'll be downtime of a few minutes not sure why

Romain Simon · Answer

I guess so. After having used Heroku, AWS, Digital Ocean and then Rende, it is my preferred option.

I might switch to someting else when it becomes too costly, but that's the easiest way to get something running without managing any infra.

Hwee-Boon Yar · Answer

I used to use Heroku and have switched to Render for my newer projects. It's basically a newer and cheaper version of Heroku.

I was just researching recently because there's a fair chance I might ship a few more projects and see which sticks; so wanted to know what is a more cost effective option to have many, low traffic sites. Even Render starts to get expensive as you run more of them (I still have projects hanging around from more than a year ago).

If you are using Ruby on Rails, It's worth checking out Hatchbox.io. It looks really attractive price-wise. I can't use it unfortunately because I'm using node/bun. I'll check out http://coolify.io/ at some point since that seems to be closer to Hatchbox.io but not tied to RoR.

I built this little comparison calculator for the services I looked at for SEO, but you can see if it helps you at least get an idea of the difference in models of PaaS vs VM vs VM+hatchbox  https://pingnow.net/hosting-comparison

Romain Simon · Answer

No I don't. I used it 15 years ago.
If you want something as simple you should look at https://render.com

Ben Katz · Answer

Nope - I use Dokku though, and it's essentially the self-hosted version of Heroku. Works on a single host or multiple hosts, you can just issue one command to update the scheduler to k3s for anything that needs to scale horizontally and let everything else run on the local docker scheduler.

Tom Mikulin · Answer

hm so render is the new kid on the block...

Dmitry Kireev · Answer

For Heroku-like things I switched to Digital Ocean Apps.
Next Level: Kamal on DO/Hetzner 
Next Level: ECS on AWS
Next (and final) Level: EKS

Ben Katz · Answer

I don't see why you couldn't use Dokku for multiple servers. Should work just as well as Kamal in that regard. 

It supports k3s as a scheduler and you can switch apps over to it with one command (after the initial setup which seems straightforward too): https://dokku.com/docs/deployment/schedulers/k3s/

Tom Mikulin · Answer

Ah so they cancelled that? Was it long ago? Just remember them being the first choice for rails devs when they wanted to deploy something. Yeah Hetzner is probably now a more cheap solution.

Tom Mikulin · Answer

ah so someone bought them, that's usually when problems come up....

Tom Mikulin · Answer

Noice

Tom Mikulin · Answer

how much do you pay for it Jason?

Josef Strzibny · Answer

I am now rewriting Kamal Handbook for Kamal 2 so there's your answer! If you want PaaS I would look at Render.

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Do you guys still use Heroku?

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