Ask HN: Heroku Replacement?

5 points by aviraldg ↗ HN
Now that Heroku is changing the way they price their service [1], it's no longer usable for small, infrequently used projects, which was my primary use case for it. Does anyone know of alternatives with similarly low or free pricing?

[1] https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2016/5/18/announcing_heroku_free_ssl_beta_and_flexible_dyno_hours

4 comments

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Running your own is the way to go if you want it cheap. Any hosted solutions are rather expensive.
I started using Dokku on Digital Ocean. They have a one-click install which makes it super easy to set up. Your projects can use the same buildpacks that you'd use on Heroku so there isn't much you will have to change within your project. You also deploy your code pushing your get repo to your dock server. There's even a letsencrypt plugin so you can easily generate SSL certs for your apps.
What part of the change means that it's no longer suitable? The free dyno hours can be shared across several infrequently used apps, and apps will sleep after inactivity to prevent them using up the free hours.