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We built a Heroku alternative made for developers with fair pricing

39 points by alexflashdrive ↗ HN
Hi Everyone!

We made https://flashdrive.io an app hosting platform made to be a consistent alternative to Heroku with developer-friendly features and pricing.

Flashdrive.io is compatible with Git and support automatic deployments, DockerFile, and DockerHub, and includes everything you need to have a scalable and reliable app : load balancer, vertical and horizontal scaling, daily backups, SSL certificates. All features are included, we do not believe in overages for mandatory functions (who doesn't need backups or SSL those days!!).

We also have a marketplace with prebuilt images including NGINX (for static sites), Wordpress, Ghost, PostHog, Hasura etc...

I would love to appreciate your feedback on the project, we offer $100 free credits (no credit card needed) and I'll be more than happy to double it if you send me an email (alex @ flashdrive.io).

Thanks! Alex. https://flashdrive.io

27 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 61.5 ms ] thread
[dead] kmusafir
wow this is so much fun!
SRO1
I waited a long time for something like that...
alexflashdrive
Glad you like it! Feel free to send us your feedback about the product, we're always looking to improve it!
[dead] rupakhan
Please add autoscaling
[dead] abubaqar113
worth a try if it's does what it says it does!
repartix
I wish the front page showed what I need to do to use it, without having to click or scroll anywhere.
alexflashdrive
Thanks! We tried to keep the homepage as simple as possible but we can definitely do better!
[dead] saifulislam3587
Saw it on producthunt earlier and tested it, very promising
[dead] mahabubbplt
Great to see containers hosting available at less than $50 per month for small compute power
craftoman
Great work! Every time I stumble upon such PaaS services I'm getting hyped until paranoid slap my face. How can anyone trust anything, these days servers can be hacked easily and besides what user's codebases can be accessed by the provider's employees or another third party company.
alexflashdrive
Thanks! I know trust is an important part, I'll never say our servers cannot be hacked because it's not true : any server can be hacked, but we made everything as strong as possible. You can directly use a docker hub image or Github to protect your code, we uses encryption as rest and our backups have data immutability to provide ransomware protection.
jfengel
Are you saying that Heroku's pricing is unfair? How so? Or are you saying that you have an alternative for the sake of diversity, which also has fair pricing?
alexflashdrive
I don't think Heroku's pricing is unfair, anyway it's not my place to say it even if I think it :) I'm just saying we made the product as developers and with developers in mind in general but specifically when it comes to pricing.

I'm convinced that we can offer a great alternative to Heroku, at a lower cost, without sacrificing what's really matter : network and infrastructure quality, backups, DDos protection etc.

jfengel
Thanks for the reply. I make some faint, intermittent forays into that space (I'm a developer but not that kind of developer). I'll keep it in mind for my next project.

Good luck!

shoo
Seems like misbehavior by one of FlashDrive's tenants can degrade experience for other tenants:

> FlashDrive’s containers can be used to send emails but the architecture of FlashDrive uses a single IP address by datacenter to provide ultra high redundancy. Since this IP is advertised by any container using FlashDrive inside the same datacenter it’s highly possible that this IP will be blacklisted pretty quickly by any major email provider. For that reason we don’t recommend the use of FlashDrive’s architecture to send emails.

https://devcenter.flashdrive.io/can-i-send-emails-with-flash...

> We are working on a solution to associate a dedicated static IP to an app for a little additional monthly fee and we will release this solution shortly.

https://devcenter.flashdrive.io/why-is-my-apps-ip-blocked-by...

Are there other aspects of the architecture where tenants are not isolated from each other?

alexflashdrive
Hi! All tenants are completely isolated from each others but FlashDrive is a load balanced service so the IP is advertised is the one of the cluster you are in. Note that we recently switched to a segmentation inside a datacenter to mitigate that issue and tenants are placed randomly inside clusters located in a datacenter (with a different IP address by cluster).
mraza007
The product looks very promising as someone who has been hosting flask projects on heroku I think its totally worth trying flashdrive and the pricing is just perfect in my opinion.

I'm just curious lets say you host a small service and pay $3/per month what if the usage of the app increases does that mean I'll be charged more than $3 dollars if I am on the dev plan

alexflashdrive
Hi! Thanks for your interest in FlashDrive! The plan only limits RAM and CPU allocations. If your app uses more than 90% of resources you will receive an email and at 100% the app may crash but reboot automatically thanks to our auto-heal function. Next week we will deploy auto scalling that will let you decide if you want your app to upgrade it's size automatically depending on usage. In any case you are never charged for more that you decide.
mraza007
Hey man thanks for replying getting over charged without knowing is my biggest fear this is why I’m hesitant when it comes to deploying services on hosting platforms but you cleared my thoughts and I’ll definitely try flashdrive for my future projects
alexflashdrive
I know, being over charged is one of the main pain point with cloud services, that's why we made FlashDrive differently and with all services included (load balancer, DDoS protection, SSL certificates, daily backups)! We'll be glad to have you :)