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Ask HN: Cheaper Heroku alternatives for Rails apps?

38 points by endorphine ↗ HN
I want something like Heroku but that is cheaper. My stack is a Rails app + 1 Postgres instance.

I know render.com and fly.io. Do you have any to recommend between these? Any other suggestions?

Besides pricing, I also want it to be as easy to set up as Heroku (or more).

EDIT: I just discovered there's also DigitalOcean's Apps. Anyone has any experience to share? Maybe it's worth considering since I'm already a paying DO customer.

Thanks!

27 comments

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rtcoms
Check Caprover, should be pretty easy if you've docker setup for rails app.
jaynetics
my experience with scalingo has been really good. they're basically a heroku clone with servers in France and cost about a third less, with great uptime and support.
elamje
Check out AWS AppRunner or Google Cloud Run. Not sure if Ruby is supported or not
antifa
As long as you can put it in a docker container, those are great.
xrd
dokku.

It's incredible.

You can easily run multiple apps in any language on dokku.

whazor
Dokku on Hetzner if you want real cheap
digianarchist
I love dokku but I wouldn’t run production workloads on it.
tbran
Can you enumerate why not?

I've heard of dokku but haven't tried it. Thought there were at least a few small SAAS businesses running it.

digianarchist
When we were running it prod we had it randomly go down multiple times. It doesn't scale past a single node either.

These days there are really affordable app hosting platforms like DO or Render.

josegonzalez
Dokku maintainer here.

Dokku does scale past a single node - you can use our kubernetes or nomad plugin for that.

Regarding "it randomly go down multiple times", I am quite curious as to what the causes here were. Instance reboots cause containers to lose IP addresses (thats a docker limitation) and upgrades of Docker Engine do the same. Outside of that, unless your app crashed due to memory constraints or bugs in code, Dokku shouldn't really touch them. It merely starts containers and lets the docker daemon keep them up. If you have any info on the issues, I'd be happy to investigate.

bberenberg
We evaluated render, fly, and digitalocean app platform. Went for the last one. It's mostly fine, the main issue is if you need to customize the app.yaml and then update any UI setting, it will overwrite the customizations. They're aware of it and are working on fixing. Ideally I wish we could store the app.yaml in our app repo itself and have it version controlled as well.
endorphine
Interesting! Can you elaborate on what made you choose DO over the others?
bberenberg
I wanted a bit more control over how backend processes worked. Our specific architectural requirements were easiest to implement with DO. Also, they have more locations, so if we want to have multi region we felt it would be easier on DO.
anurag
(Render CEO) what kind of backend controls would you like in Render? FWIW, we now have 4 regions in GA and will continue to add more over time.
aosaigh
Also using Digital Ocean App Platform. It's good once you understand it and get up-and-running, but their documentation and interface isn't good (yet). I would recommend trying to use Dockerfiles and their doctl CLI tool, as the web interface is confusing and limited.
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logankeenan
How’s the build time now for deployments? I tried DO app platform in the fall of 2021 and the time to deploy was very long. 20+ minutes for barebones Rails app.
bberenberg
Slower than I would like. But this wasn't a particularly important to our requirements. I would much rather they focus on allowing us to manage app config via code for example.
atmosx
Out of curiosity how many rps you serve and how is reliability wise?
bberenberg
Good question about RPS, not really sure. We run the smallest VM resource size and it works fine for what we do. We're going to be leaning into more monitoring this year so we will hopefully have better answers to this questions.

Reliability, I would say it's the same as the rest of DO. Good enough for my small business purposes.

Awmusic12635
Have been using render for about 2 months now and it’s been good so far. Originally migrated from heroku as well.

I really like using their blueprint setup and there is a nice sense of rapid iteration on their product with a public roadmap. Definitely worth giving a try.

sergiotapia
Use render.com they are fairly priced and will let you get the devops out of the way very quickly. Very happy customer here.
mardix
If you want to do it yourself, checkout Sailor[0].

Sailor is a tiny PaaS to install on your servers/VPS that uses git push to deploy micro-apps, micro-services, sites with SSL, on your own servers or VPS

[0] https://github.com/mardix/sailor

nisanth074
We're currently trailing Cloud 66 (cloud66.com) and are happy with it so far