How do you ship your side project? Is heroku my best bet?

I agree with @Artemitch, it depends on your stack. I can also recommend Netlify for static builds. If you need serverless - Zeit Now v2 is pretty nice (also supports static builds)

Agree with most of the folks in here. Depends where you want to spend your time and what your side project is!

If you're spinning up a basic Rails (or insert platform here) app with some frontend magic, Heroku is awesome for that. It's fast, relatively inexpensive to get started (Free or $7/mo if you want it up all the time), etc.

I've hosted (and currently host) huge enterprise apps and tiny little baby apps on there with no problems, though, the big ones end up costing more than I'd like :) The ease of scalability is worth it for me in most cases though.

Good luck! Can't wait to hear more about the project.

If you are looking for fast and easy to use, go with Heroku.

Would you use a tool that gave a Heroku-like experience deploying to your own VPS?

What I mean by Heroku-like experience is:

• Simple config file like app.json to specify the stack.
• git push to deploy.

I've been tinkering with something that does this for my own use. I am not sure how much demand there would be to make it public.

Does anyone use docker to deploy? I figured with all the docker swarm/kubernetes/nomad etc solutions out there it would be really easy to deploy a docker container.

Do you feel like the current deploy situation is too involved? Maybe I'm just getting calcified by working for people instead of for myself but it feels like the startup cost of a saas is really high in time, $, and/or lockin.

Netlify for static, Zeit for serverless, but there are many other options.

Some really good versatile one that I'm looking into include (on top of a regular server on DO or something) OpsCaptain or Hatchbox or one of the hundreds of similar services.

I started a side project on Heroku three years ago, it's now serving 5000 customers and my monthly heroku bill is < 3% of MRR. For me, it's a no-brainer to stay on heroku

Yes, Heroku is your best bet if you need a runtime and a database.

The big, BIG thing is that it is really pretty much the most solid solution with the least amount of worry. Heroku as also carefully figured out the growth path, where you are always just one click away from adding that extra thing you now need because your app has grown or you need some extra logging/monitoring etc.

It takes a while to get used to though, but once you get it and get comfortable with their CLI tool its pretty amazing how much of the complexity they take care of.

Static sites does not really matter that much. Netlify is fine, our AWS S3 or Github pages.

Note: I'm a total Heroku fanboy though. I should get a kickback fee from them. Saying this as an AWS user for many, many years now.

Hi Jake

I think it boils down to what you want to spend your time on. Personally I use Heroku quite a lot. It's obviously a lot more expensive than running your apps on Digital Ocean or similar, but it just works.

• Setting up a new app to run on Heroku = 1-2 hours
• Setting up a new app to run on other infrastructure = 6+ hours + running maintenance + running deploys etc.

If time is cheaper than money, roll with your own setup, otherwise, roll with Heroku :)

.. Just my two cents

I think it depends on the stack. For landing pages and static websites I tend to use Netlify. Anything more than that I tend to use Digital Ocean. Either with a standard Ubuntu install or adding Dokku if I think it's needed ( https://github.com/dokku/dokku ).

I'm also tempted to give Google Cloud App Engine / Compute / Functions a try since there's a free tier. I just haven't gotten around to it yet.