What should I use instead of Heroku?

Heroku alternatives have gone in a few different directions: - next-gen PasS that are more opinionated and offer wider range of services. Also can be cheaper. examples are Digital ocean, Railway or render - Performance-focused PaaS like fly.io - "Heroku in your own cloud" like porter.dev, architect.io or quovery - k8s tooling like garden.io, ReleaseHub, even gitlab - these are often geared more towards internal DevOps teams at larger orgs when compared to the very low-lift PasS providers - serverless providers - like cloudflare functions, AWS lambda, GCP Cloud Run - Vercel/Netlify - SPA + serverless with a great developer experience - Replit - kind of in a category of their own but they have integrated hosting/datastores/user auth

Lots of awesome products here, I'd argue that only replit is a true 10x change from the Heroku innovations in terms of providing a next-gen developer experience.

I'm the cofounder of a new company called Coherence, that we think creates a new direction and offers a better platform for the next leap forward. By integrating from dev to prod and capturing the whole SDLC, as well as by operating in your own cloud, we're focused on delivering the best developer experience possible, without compromising anywhere else. For example, by not building 100% on k8s we’re able to offer Cloud Run on GCP or App Runner on AWS, which are “free-tier” friendly without the fixed costs of the k8s baseline infra that other “in your own cloud” providers have. Check us out at https://www.withcoherence.com. We're in an early closed beta so not yet a fit for all teams, but feedback is welcome!

I know it’s not shiny and new, but we use AWS Elastic Beanstalk, which automates everything but still gives us full control over the EC2 instances if we need it. It has built-in support for Docker, PHP, and several others. We use AWS’s managed databases (RDS/Aurora) and Redis (ElastiCache) with automatic failover, and both have been solid in the three years we’ve been on this setup.

Why not just use a $10/month bare bones virtual machine?

I just use plain Debian, copy my stuff over via rsync and everything works fine.

The machine gets something like 10k users on a normal day. In the past, it occasionally handled 30x that.

I absolutely adore https://www.glitch.com for low traffic, small and simple apps. It’s Joel Spolsky’s project; and he’s got Trello, StackOverflow and FogBugz as his previous companies (Fog Creek I think?). Give it a whirl!

I think you can run PHP on there now too; see https://glitch.com/edit/#!/php-poc

For even simpler (static JS/HTML), I just publish on GitLab or GitHub pages.

I recommend Caprover. It's a simple container environment that hosts your services via sensible nginx configurations and Docker swarm, has a cli tool that can be utilized for CI purposes, and provides easy spin-up for common OSS web-apps.

I utilize it to host many different PHP and Java apps.

https://github.com/caprover/caprover

Nowadays render.com and fly.io are the most promising alternatives.

Your own server running on your own connection, running off a(n extra) solar panel on your roof which you use to charge a biggish UPS - enough for keeping it alive through the night. If a SBC like a Raspberry Pi is sufficient (and that's what your description sounds like) use something like that, alternatively get something bigger. A single 450W (1x2 meters) solar panel is enough for a lot of computing. Judging by what you describe it should be quite easy to rig up a workflow using standard components which fits your bill, no need for trendy technologies which are sure to be deprecated in a few years when the new trendy thing takes up its place for a year or two in the limelight. Set the thing to automatically fetch and install security updates, only expose web and SSH on a non-standard port (add port knocking if you feel like taking that extra step) and you're set for a long time.

Running your own services is not hard, no matter what naysayers tell you. Just give it a try, start small as described a RasPi uses a few watts so you won't even need that solar system here.

I know others have suggested this too but https://fly.io is great! Very generous free tier, and it feels as magical as Heroku did when I first used it years ago.

I’ve worked as an SRE and do a fair amount of infrastructure work at my job, so I’ve had periods of time where I ran my own k8s cluster for side projects and more recently ran a nomad cluster. The big caveat here is I enjoyed doing this and it helped my career experimenting with infra in my free time before suggesting it internally. I’ve also had bare metal servers and some of the whole classic fabulous monolith thing which is its own beast.

All that said, if you just want some small easy to use compute with little maintenance definitely give Fly a try! (Not affiliated, just a happy new customer)

For PHP https://platform.sh has got a lot of traction, but it's notc cheap especially for small apps.

If you hadn't wanted the Docker-based backing I would suggest trying one of the services that automates setting up your VMs at AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode etc like https://forge.laravel.com/, https://runcloud.io/, https://serverpilot.io/, https://www.cloudways.com/ etc

Give render.com a try. I used it for our latest startup and it was overall a pleasant experience.

For me it's the sweet spot between Heroku and AWS.

Don't have specifics, but Azure gives you something like $70 a month free for ever - might be able to run your stuff there for less. Oracle also has something similar - a few VMs free forever that would probably suffice.

Fly.io seems like it might be a good fit. They support Docker + Postgres (they recommend just running Redis in Docker and have instructions for how to do this). And they provide a Github Action for deployment.

Get a generic server and toss dokku on it.

I'm in a similar boat. Except I do not want any GitHub integration and would rather not use Docker. I have simple needs and don't want to manage a server. To me, it is rather strange that there are so few providers that allow pushing code without GitHub/GitLab/Git. Allow me to upload a tar (or similar) and I'm happy.

Any recommendations for two small Node.js applications?

For long running tasks (cron jobs, message queues, fire and forget) I’m the cofounder of https://www.tasker.sh, YC S21.

Feel free to ping me: jay@tasker.sh, happy to personally help onboard and toss in some credits if you’d be willing to chat with us about what you’re building!

I’d start answering this question by asking “why do you want to leave heroku”.

If as you’re stating, the recent security issues are the main reason, I am pretty sure you’re not going to find a better solution by switching. Any vendor or internal ops team is going to have vulnerabilities. Thinking security issues are limited to Heroku is not logical.

However you might object to the way they handled the security issues. I totally agree with that being a good reason, not because of this specific incident, but because in my opinion, this is a sign of bigger issues at heroku. In short Heroku has been stale from a product point of view and has lost a lot of good talent to deal with product and operational needs they have.

To me, replacing one PaaS with another is not a good idea. All PaaS providers suffer from the same fundamental issues of rigidity (you work around their limitations and not the other way around), price (they can’t transfer commoditisation of the cloud to their customers), and vendor risk (single vendor that can be bought and shut down by the buyer - remember AppFog or Tutum? - or at least lock you in)

Doing it yourself is also not a very wise choice for a lot of people: you either need a devops and SRE team or you’re left copy pasting scripts from across the internet to build and configure your servers.

Alternatively you’re pressed to learn a new tech (kubernetes, dokku, et al) and spend your time on that instead of your app.

I’m a proponent of a middle ground: vendors that take care of devops for you, the way your team would have done so, without the inhibitive costs. Consultancies are one option but they can build something for you at a cost and then you’re left with either keeping them around to maintain it to stuck with a tech stack you can’t manipulate yourself.

Companies like Cloud 66 or any other ones that build and maintain a PaaS like experience on your own servers without their own complex magic are the best ones out there in my opinion.

I’m biased towards Cloud 66 as a founder, but we built it not to build another PaaS, but to try to address the actual question of why everyone starts with heroku and no one seems to stay on it for long.

Digital Ocean has a buildpack based system and is pretty darn nice.

You may want to consider vanilla kubernetes and https://codezero.io for the development part of the SDLC. Also, here are some considerations when taking a platform based vs tools set based approach to the whole SDLC https://blog.codezero.io/5-myths-of-kubernetes/

AWS elastic beanstalk. Works with docker and handles running and scaling your app for the raw cost of the EC2 underneath. It's essentially heroku on AWS.

Have a look at cloud66.com It takes a different approach to the problem: it creates an environment like Heroku but on your servers on any cloud. This creates many benefits, including persistent storage and support for all available regions of your cloud provider of choice. But it also makes a big difference in availability: your application is not dependent on Cloud 66’s availability and won’t go down.

Look into running Dokku.

Simple and easy and we use it for a LOT of things. It does not tie you into dokku itself and you can manipulate everything yourself with docker and nginx.

Dokku is merely an easy interface on top of the OS.

It’s really not hard. Read the docs and you will be up and running pretty quickly.

Then it’s just a simple “gut push dokku master” to deploy your apps.

Scalingo is a great European-based Heroku alternative, reusing the buildpacks and 12factor approach, it’s very easy to migrate to!

We did: https://scalingo.com/customers/le-wagon

I have similar question. I use mainly webapps but I deploy a container image... I'd like to find something similar and free but european if possible?

There’s always rolling your own BOSH+CloudFoundry, but that be a bit heavy for your idea case. How about playing with microk8s and seeing if it works for you?

Not a straight alternative but I use Firebase for a lot of “small” projects.

Been a long-time fan of Railway (https://railway.app) — seems like it would be a great option here.

If you wanna see pure magic, CMD+K —> PostgreSQL (or Redis). ~3s and you’re good to go.