I've had a generally great experience with Render. Really glad I moved my main side-project to it at the beginning of 2022. I saw usage of my project really ramp up over the course of last year, and I shudder to think of what my opex on Heroku would've been.
We really wanted to like Render, but the performance just wasn't there for us when doing a bunch of load testing against Heroku, which is a shame. Hoping they can make it better in the coming months/years cos we really liked the product.
Interesting. Could you share more about the types of loads you were testing with?
Our tests for simple JavaScript endpoints with a MongoDB call to be just as fast or faster on Render. Additionally the availability of far more tiers of cpu/ram meant we could see the same performance for half the cost.
Node.js + mongodb, definitely some not-so-performant pages with a few more db lookups than probably necessary. We also spun up a new Atlas cluster in the same region to rule out the cross data center latency.
That sounds very similar. We also spun up a Mongo instance in us-east-2 and the performance was fantastic. Round trip from the server to the mongo instance was super low and comparable to the Heroku / Mongo times on us-east-1
Bummer you had a different experience.
Hi Dom! After more evaluation, we think your experience was a Virginia vs Ohio problem. Once we have Virginia set up (along with a few other things our teams talked about) I'd love for y'all to give us another shot.
Did your total devops cost go up or down? I'm sure aws is less expensive than heroku but I assume now you are paying more to people to do what heroku did?
We are spending about 60% less. Workload has actually lessened since AWS is so much more stable. Getting to a similar DX as Heroku was quite the lift, but once it's done, it's done. These days we generally only have outages when we screw something up ourselves. I recommend https://github.com/aws/copilot-cli for starting out on ECS.
For all heroku's done wrong it has been rock solid for us for nearly 10 years. The only outage I can remember in all that time is when they were having issues with their upstream dns a little while ago. Even this incident isn't causing any down time for us - we just can't deploy updates until it is fixed. I guess if we had a critical fix on deck it could be considered an "outage" though.
After the large pricing increases, the dumping of free apps, the lack of a facility to deploy to local (e.g. asia-pacific) regions without a "private space", and the astronomical prices for these private spaces, plus the complete lack of innovation, it's time for me to move on and learn a new vendor's offerings. Truly the last straw. Once a successful startup is purchased by one of these legacy giants, it really is the forbidding end of the invention that made the startup a winner to begin with.
To be fair, Salesforce bought Heroku in 2010, just three years after it was founded. Much of the innovation at Heroku happened under the Salesforce umbrella.
What's the least friction alternative? I'm find with my database being hosted on Heroku (for now), what other service can I set up as a git remove, transfer my env vars, update my DNS and be good to go?
Its been one hell of a rough go for Heroku lately.
I think you would be insane to start a new project with them today. Which is crazy for me to say, as I was one of their biggest fans for the last decade.
I remember reading a job posting from Heroku's heyday that said something along the lines of "Heroku haters need not apply". I think at the time they were just starting to cop some flak for their pricing. I wonder what the majority of the die-hard fans of yester-year did.
54 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadPretty sure some of their cron/scheduling stuff is affected too :-\
Universe really doesn't want my team doing any work this week.
Currently we have moved about 15% of our traffic off of Heroku. It might be time to accelerate that exit.
Our tests for simple JavaScript endpoints with a MongoDB call to be just as fast or faster on Render. Additionally the availability of far more tiers of cpu/ram meant we could see the same performance for half the cost.
copilot cli looks cool though.
Disclosure - I’m a cofounder
Disclaimer: I'm the founder
Hate to break it to you but you've always been on AWS ;)
... what?
Is this a joke or do some people/orgs actually pay these amount of those specs (+ the other stuff that's included, obviously)?
If so, I need to rethink which market segment I'm in...
I am missing a blockchain reference
I think you would be insane to start a new project with them today. Which is crazy for me to say, as I was one of their biggest fans for the last decade.