PaaS provider alternative to Heroku
Does anyone have experience using render.com? I am a dev with little ops experience. I would like to host a Rails app which relies on Postgres, Sidekiq and Elasticsearch. Heroku quickly gets expensive, so I came across render.com
Any other services that are easy to use and not too expensive to run that IndieHackers can recommend?
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If you're reading this, you're using Render (indirectly) because IH is hosted there. So are a lot of other indie hacker apps and websites. Happy to help in any way here or in our user community at https://render.com/chat.
Thanks @anuragg I had forgotten IH was hosted on Render and that is a great vote of confidence and reason you use your product too.
Didn't know IH was running on Render! Congrats on the awesome product, the ease of Heroku minus the huge costs sounds like a winning formula.
I'm the co-founder of Qovery which is a PaaS on top of AWS. We have a free community plan up to 3 applications (database included). Our business model is based on Enterprise hosting - which give us the possibility to offer free plan for all non profit / open source / private projects.
Nice landing page. @ev0xmusic
I like the fact that it offers free community plan.
Thanks @junji 🙏
Have you heard about Jelastic Multi-Cloud PaaS? I'm co-founder of this project. I was developer and still consider myself as such. We invented unique pay-per-use pricing model, so developers should not pay for VMs / instance limits - only for actually consumed resources. Also there is auto discount for volume - bigger consumption brings the cost of the resource unit down. We have a wide network of hosting partners around the world (36+ countries, and 77+ data centers today). Give it a try and let me know if you like or not :).
Thanks for the tip. I'll keep that in mind. I did end up deploying everything to render and I must say it was pretty simple to get postgres, the rails app and elasticsearch running together.
Very good that you found simple and suitable solution 👍
I use Dokku, if you have a Linux background it's super easy to use the many packages the distro provides. But if you don't want to have any ops work, its probably not the best choice.
Yeah I used Dokku too. Great for a small number of apps.
Yeah, I enjoyed Dokku for a smaller project in the past. This time I need a bit more infrastructure (Sidekiq, Elasticsearch) and want to be distracted less by OPS work.
https://www.clever-cloud.com/en/ is a nice alternative to Heroku.
AWS Elastic BeansTalk is another viable alternative: https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/
I use AWS Elastic Beanstalk in production. It works well, although setting up some things is a pain (e.g., routing custom logs into Cloudwatch). However, it's pretty cost-effective, especially if you have AWS credits. There are a few other benefits to it:
It allows a lot of control over the hardware that your app runs on.
If you are already using other AWS services (S3 or RDS, for instance), then it's nice to have everything all together.
You have a lot more control over security. You can put everything into a VPC, put different services into different subnets, and control network ingress and egress.
None of these things are trivial though and AWS's documentation can be a bit inscrutable at time, so expect to put in an up-front investment of time and effort to get it running.
Interesting, that seems to be Amazon's Elasticsearch product. I think it would make sense to use together with EC2 instances, but I feel that's too much OPS configuration.
I did some digging and will look more closely at Render.
Thanks for the suggestion though!
Hey Robert, I don't think you captured the essence of AWS BeansTalk. It's not an Elasticsearch product at all. It's a fully-fledged PaaS offering from Amazon:
"AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services developed with Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker on familiar servers such as Apache, Nginx, Passenger, and IIS.
You can simply upload your code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment, from capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling to application health monitoring. At the same time, you retain full control over the AWS resources powering your application and can access the underlying resources at any time."
Oh, wow. I really got that wrong. Thanks for the clarification @TangoKilo!
I wasn't aware of this AWS offer and from what you describe it sounds very much like what I was looking for. Interesting.
I wonder how it compare to render.
I don't know Render. I checked out their offering, and I'm a bit worried that I can not find anything related to horizontal scaling/autoscaling. Also, production-level database and dyno pricing is on request only).
I’m looking into this since Stripe atlas gives you free AWS credits.
amezmo (founder) is an alternative.
Sounds like this is only for PHP? I'm running a Rails app.
If you have some ops experience and are ok with learning as you go, Dokku is a free Heroku-like tool you can install on cloud servers:
http://dokku.viewdocs.io/dokku/ (Edit: I don't think it has a GUI btw)
DigitalOcean also bought NanoBox a while back and, judging by the surveys and e-mails they've been sending me, are about to start allowing beta testing it: https://www.digitalocean.com/nanobox/
I did use Dokku for a few sideprojects, but it took me a while to configure cronjobs and this time I would like to save time by configuring less.
Never heard of Nanobox. I'll check it out. Thanks for the tips @AndrewV
Just remembered that I wrote a small blog post about using Dokku a while ago. Leaving it here in case it's useful to anyone else: https://blog.robertsj.com/deploying-a-rails-app-with-dokku/
I haven't used it but have heard it's quite a bit cheaper than Heroku.
Depending on how comfortable you are with containers, and how scalable your application needs to be, you can get a Rails app + Postgres + Sidekiq running on a single VM instance.
You can orchestrate with Kubernetes or Docker Compose and run it on a DigitalOcean droplet, AWS EC2, GCE quite cheaply.
Kubernetes on DigitalOcean is a delight! I'm running my latest project on it actually!
Although I have mixed feeling about using Kubernetes if you don't have any hands-on experience - sure it is much easier than managing stuff yourself but it's still a bit more to tackle initially.
That being said, Kubernetes fundamentals aren't too complicated and there's a wonderful interactive tutorial on the official website that will get anyone started in no time.
I think this would be ideal in terms of configurability, flexibility and cost. But I am not too familiar with containers yet and figured it would be better to invest less time in learning about OPS right now and more in developing the end product.
In that case, Heroku, Render, Google AppEngine, or AWS Beanstalk are probably your best options. I would play around with their price configurators to see which would be most cost beneficial to you. Good luck!
Came across ploi.io recently. Looks like its worth giving a shot.
That looks very cool indeed. Haven't quite understood what part of the infrastructure they offer though? I purchase Digital Ocean instances and then use Ploi to configure them?