Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server

https://disco.cloud/blog/how-idealistorg-replaced-a-3000mo-heroku-bill-with-a-55-server/

by jryio • 9 months ago

813 550 9 months ago

disco.cloud

gregsadetsky25• 9 months ago

Heya, Disco is the open source PaaS I've been working on with my friend Antoine Leclair.

Lots of conversation & discussion about self-hosting / cloud exits these days (pros, cons, etc.) Happy to engage :-)

Cheers!

bstsb2• 9 months ago

what does this service offer over an established tool like Coolify? currently hosting most of my services on a cheap Hetzner VPS so i'm interested what Disco has to offer

alberth2• 9 months ago

Or Dokku, Dokploy or CapRover

Would be great to have a comparison on the main page of Disco

odie55339• 9 months ago

There's quite a few now. Coolify, Dokku, CapRover, Kamal.

gregsadetsky25• 9 months ago

Coolify and other self-hosting options such as Kamal are great. We're all in the same boat!

I'd say the main differences is that we 1) we offer a more streamlined CLI and UI rather than offering extensive app/installation options 2) have an api-key based system that lets team members collaborate without having to manage ssh access/keys.

Generally speaking, I'd say our approach and tooling/UX tends to be more functional/pragmatic (like Heroku) than one with every possible option.

Onavo2• 9 months ago

There's also Canine and Kubero

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44292103

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44873057

JrProgrammer2• 9 months ago

There is also Dokploy which is what I've been using on my homelab for a while. https://dokploy.com/

martinald• 9 months ago

Just to be aware when you say "Even with all 6 environments and other projects running, the server's resource usage remained low. The average CPU load stayed under 10%, and memory usage sat at just ~14 GB of the available 32 GB."

The load average in htop is actually per CPU core. So if you have 8 CPU cores like in your screenshot, a load average of 0.1 is actually 1.25% (10% / 8) of total CPU capacity - even better :).

Cool blog! I've been having so much success with this type of pattern!

gregsadetsky25• 9 months ago

Sharp eye! Thanks. Fixed

__mharrison__3• 9 months ago

Thanks for sharing. I have an app I'm working on and this seems perfect for it.

carzilla• 9 months ago

Hi,

Interesting project. Do you have any screenshots of the UI of Disco?

gregsadetsky25• 9 months ago

The microscopic screenshot on the homepage of https://disco.cloud is almost everything we have - I really really need to update the docs

Oh, there’s actually this tutorial that shows a tiny preview of it:

https://disco.cloud/docs/deployment-guides/meilisearch

Thanks for the reminder!

tempest_3• 9 months ago

The cloud has made people forget how far you can get with a single machine.

Hosting staging envs in pricey cloud envs seems crazy to me but I understand why you would want to because modern clouds can have a lot of moving parts.

odie55339• 9 months ago

Fully replicating prod is helpful. Saves time since deployment is similar and does a better test of what prod will be.

teaearlgraycold• 9 months ago

Completely agree. It’s not a staging server if it’s hosted on a different platform.

j453• 9 months ago

Cloud often has everyone thinking it's still 2008.

tempest_3• 9 months ago

With some obvious exceptions there isnt much you cant run on a 200 Core machine wrt web services.

rikafurude213• 9 months ago

The cloud has made people afraid of linux servers. The markup is essentially just the price business has to pay because of developer insecurity. The irony is that self hosting is relatively simple, and alot of fun. Personally never got the appeal of Heroku, Vercel and similar, because theres nothing better than spinning up a server and setting it up from scratch. Every developer should try it.

agumonkey• 9 months ago

my take is that it's fun up until there's just enough brittleness and chaos.. too many instance of the same thing but with too many env variables setup by hand and then fuzzy bug starts to pile up

daemonologist• 9 months ago

I dunno, the cloud has mostly made me afraid of the cloud. You can bury yourself in towering complexity so easily on AWS. (The highly managed stuff like Vercel I don't have much experience with, so maybe it's different.)

tempest_3• 9 months ago

It is way more than that though.

It offloads things like - Power Usage - Colo Costs - Networking (a big one) - Storage (SSD wear / HDD pools) - etc

It is a long list but what doesnt allow you do it make trade offs like spending way less but accept downtime if your switch dies etc etc.

For a staging env these are things you might want to do.

jampekka• 9 months ago

The irony is that self hosting is relatively simple, and alot of fun. Personally never got the appeal of Heroku, Vercel and similar, because theres nothing better than spinning up a server and setting it up from scratch.

It's fun the first time, but becomes an annoying faff when it has to be repeated constantly.

In Heroku, Vercel and similar you git push and you're running. On a linux server you set up the OS, the server authentication, the application itself, the systemctl jobs, the reverse proxy, the code deployment, the ssl key management, the monitoring etc etc.

I still do prefer a linux server due to the flexibility, but the UX could be a lot better.

sokoloff2• 9 months ago

the price business has to pay because of developer insecurity

Is it mostly developer insecurity, or mostly tech leadership insecurity?

fragmede7• 9 months ago

Never got the appeal of having someone else do something for you, and giving them money, in exchange for goods and services? Vercel is easy. You pay them to make it easy. When you're just getting started, you start on easy mode before you jump into the deep end of the pool. Everybody's got a different cup of tea, and some like it hot and others like it cold.

rapind2• 9 months ago

Honestly I think it's the database that makes devs insecure. The stakes are high and you usually want PITR and regular backups even for low traffic apps. Having a "simple" turnkey service for this that can run in any environment (dedicated, VPS, colo, etc.) would be huge.

I think this is partly responsible for the increased popularity of sqlite as a backend. It's super simple and lightstream for recovery isn't that complicated.

Most apps don't need 5 9s, but they do care about losing data. Eliminate the possibility of losing data, without paying tons of $ to also eliminate potential outages, and you'll get a lot of customers.

MangoCoffee• 9 months ago

The cloud has made people forget that the internet is decentralized.

jamestimmins• 9 months ago

This could be the premise for a fun project based infra learning site.

You get X resources in the cloud and know that a certain request/load profile will run against it. You have to configure things to handle that load, and are scored against other people.

YouAreWRONGtoo2• 9 months ago

All it means is that the cloud doesn't work like a power socket, which was the whole point of it.

Things like Lambda do fit in this model, but they are too inefficient to model every workload.

Amazon lacks vision.

altcognito• 9 months ago

The weird thing is the relationship between developer costs and operations costs. For startups that pay salaries, $3000 a month is a pittance!*

* The big caveat: If you don't incur the exact same devops costs that would have happened with a linux instance.

Many tools (containers in particular) have cropped up that have made things like quick, redundant deployment pretty straightforward and cheap.

andersa• 9 months ago

The best part is when you start with a $3000/month cloud bill during development and finally realize that hosting the production instance this way would actually cost $300k/month, but now it's too late to change it quickly.

jeroenhd• 9 months ago

Teaching a whole bunch of developers some cloud basics and having a few cloud people around is relatively cheap for quite a while. Plus, having test/staging/prod on similar configurations will help catch mistakes earlier. None of that "localstack runs just fine but it turns out Amazon SES isn't available in region antartica-east-1". Then, eventually, you pay a couple people's wages extra in cloud bills, and leaving the cloud becomes profitable.

Cloud isn't worth it until suddenly it is because you can't deploy your own servers fast enough, and then it's worth it until it exceeds the price of a solid infrastructure team and hardware. There's a curve to how much you're saving by throwing everything in the cloud.

nine_k3• 9 months ago

Deploying to your private cloud requires basically the same skills. Containers, k8s or whatnot, S3, etc. Operating a large DB on bare metal is different from using a managed DB like Aurora, bit for developers, the difference is hardly visible.

matt-p4• 9 months ago

RDS/managed database is extremely nice I will admit, otherwise I agree. Similarly s3, if you're going to do object storage, then running minio or whatever locally is probably not cheaper overall than R2 or similar.

nimbius• 9 months ago

you can literally buy a used dell desktop that matches the spec for hetzner (8 core, 32 gigs of ram) for under 500 USD. Why wouldnt you just do that?

As cloud marches on it continues to seem like a grift.

sodality2• 9 months ago

Do you plan on keeping it in your home? At that point I'd be worried about ISP networking or power guarantees unless you plan on upgrading to business rates for both. If you mean colo, well, if you're sure you'll be using it in X years, it's worth it, but the flexibility of month-to-month might be preferable.

SchemaLoad• 9 months ago

Because that used desktop is subject to power outages, internet outages, the cleaners unplugging it, etc. Datacenters have redundancy on everything.

marcosdumay3• 9 months ago

And you'll need some $100/month to colocate that thing, so you are better spending some more and buying a reasonable server that uses only 1U.

noosphr• 9 months ago

The cloud was a good deal in 2006 when the smallest aws machine was about the size of a ok dev desktop and took over two years of renting to justify buying the physical machine outright.

Today the smallest, and even large, aws machines are a joke, comparable to a mobile phone from 15 years ago to a terrible laptop today, and take about three to six months to in rent as buying the hardware outright.

If you're on the cloud without getting 75% discount you will save money and headcount by doing everything on prem.

adgjlsfhk12• 9 months ago

also how far you can get with a single machine has changed massively in the past 15 years. 15 years ago a (really beefy) single machine meant 8 cores with 256GB ram and a couple TB of storage. Now a single machine can be 256 cores on 8TB of ram and a PB of storage.

layoric3• 9 months ago

Exactly, and the performance of consumer tech is wildly faster. Eg, a Ryzen 5825U mini pc with 16GB memory is ~$250USD with 512GB nvme. That thing will outperform of 14 core Xeon from ~2016 on multicore workloads and absolutely thrash it in single thread. Yes lack of ECC is not good for any serious workload, but great for lower environments/testing/prototyping, and it sips power at ~50W full tilt.

wild_egg• 9 months ago

I saw a twitter thread recently where someone tried to make this point to someone shilling AWS spaghetti architectures. They were subsequently dog-piled into oblivion but the mental gymnastics people can do around this subject is a sight to behold.

Simplicity is uncomfortable to a lot of people when they're used to doing things the hard way.

matt-p4• 9 months ago

You put your staging env in the same (kind of) place you put your prod system because you need to replicate your prod environment as faithfully as possible. You also then get to re-use your deployment code.

zachrip• 9 months ago

Heroku's pricing model made me shy away even from using them for small stuff. Why get comfortable on a stack that disincentivizes success?

j453• 9 months ago

The kind of headline that is worth learning more about.

Dokku can be an option if needed to maintain heroku endpoints.

nine_k3• 9 months ago

Nice! Way to go for non-prod environments. (For prod you'd need some redundancy at least.)

Quick question: how long would it take to provision and set up another server if this one dies?

sarchertech• 9 months ago

I bet less time than it takes AWS to recover from a significant event. And I bet it happens less often too.

odie55339• 9 months ago

Ideally these things should go in an Ansible playbook or whatever people are using these days to manage their pets.

nine_k3• 9 months ago

I mean the availability of the hardware. It's a dedicated server, AFAICT.

ygouzerh5• 9 months ago

One thing however to note, is that by having a different non-prod and prod environment, it will be possible to test only the application, and not the infra.

Which means, that if they want to test what it will look like running in cloud for prod, they are going to either need a pre-prod environment or go yolo

gregsadetsky25• 9 months ago

The longest is to adapt your app to a Dockerfile-based deployment, if it isn't already containerized. We have examples for most languages - for Flask, for example, the whole file is 10 lines long [0]

But to provision a new server, as these are "stateless" (per 12 Factor) servers, it's just 1) get a VPS 2) install Docker+Disco using our curl|sh install script 3) authorize github 4) deploy a "project" (what we call an app), setting the env vars.

All in all ~10 minutes for a new machine.

[0] https://github.com/gregsadetsky/example-flask-site/blob/main...

ornornor2• 9 months ago

Is this really all it takes? I’m curious because for me the value of heroku etc is not the PaaS itself but the infra: hardening the server, load balancing, redundancy, monitoring, alerting, connectivity, storage… and that’s always the hole in the selfhosted PaaS story for me. I’d love to solve it but it’s handwaved every time whenever these topics come up. Any pointers?

zachlatta2• 9 months ago

We've had a similar experience at Hack Club, the nonprofit I run that helps high schoolers get into coding and electronics.

We used to be on Heroku and the cost wasn't just the high monthly bill - it was asking "is this little utility app I just wrote really worth paying $15/month to host?" before working on it.

This year we moved to a self-hosted setup on Coolify and have about 300 services running on a single server for $300/month on Hetzner. For the most part, it's been great and let us ship a lot more code!

My biggest realization is that for an organization like us, we really only need 99% uptime on most of our services (not 99.99%). Most developer tools are around helping you reach 99.99% uptime. When you realize you only need 99%, the world opens up.

Disco looks really cool and I'm excited to check it out!

gregsadetsky25• 9 months ago

Cheers, let me know if you do / hop onto our Discord for any questions.

We know of two similar cases: a bootcamp/dev school in Puerto Rico that lets its students deploy all of their final projects to a single VPS, and a Raspberry Pi that we've set up at the Recurse Center [0] which is used to host (double checking now) ~75 web projects. On a single Pi!

[0] https://www.recurse.com/

IshKebab2• 9 months ago

300 services?? What do they all do?

zachlatta2• 9 months ago

Tons of little Slack bots and apps and stuff! It’s a vibrant community and people are always making cool little tools

radiator• 9 months ago

And if you really needed 99.99%, you would be wise to avoid the hyperscalers: see AWS' recent multi-hour long outage.

mudkipdev• 9 months ago

Can I ask which hetzner instance you use?

bstsb2• 9 months ago

i'd be interested what the load is like on that CCX33 server - i've got a lower-spec VPS from Hetzner and even from there I'm only using about 25%-30% CPU/RAM with a moderate load

odie55339• 9 months ago

From the article:

Even with all 6 environments and other projects running, the server's resource usage remained low. The average CPU load stayed under 10%, and memory usage sat at just ~14 GB of the available 32 GB.

masterj• 9 months ago

Title seems slightly exaggerated since by my reading there was no actual $3000 / month bill? Still a great use-case

This seems like a good idea to have plentiful dev environments and avoid a bad pricing model. If your production instance is still on Heroku, you might still want a staging environment on Heroku since a Hetzner server and your production instance might have subtle differences.

ed_elliott_asc• 9 months ago

Do they really need a full mirror of production?

zdragnar• 9 months ago

Every time I've worked somewhere without one, we've wanted it and wasted more developer hours than the cost of having it trying to reproduce issues while working around the differences in the environments.

SFHacker21• 9 months ago

oh good point

killingtime74• 9 months ago

Hetzner cloud has instances in US, which could work since they don't need the stability of dedicated for staging/dev.

turtlebits• 9 months ago

It sounds more like poor choices. 6 staging environments sounds a bit overkill.

If you can fit them all on a 4 cpu / 32gb machine, you can easily forgo them and run the stack locally on a dev machine. IME staging environments are generally snowflakes that are hard to stand up (no automation).

$500/month each is a gross overpayment.

viraptor• 9 months ago

you can easily forgo them and run the stack locally

Not if you're running with external resources of specific type, or want to share the ongoing work with others. Or need to setup 6 different projects with 3 different databases at the same time. It really depends on your setup and way of working. Sometimes you can do local staging easily, sometimes it's going to be a lot of pain.

swanson• 9 months ago

I guess I'm not quite understanding why you need six staging servers provisioned at $500 a pop? And if you need that because you have a large team...what percentage of your engineering spend is $3000 vs $100k+/yr salaries?

Especially when I got look at the site in question (idealist.org) and it seems to be a pretty boring job board product.

odie55339• 9 months ago

From what I read, they're using them as dev environments. Like running many services at once for a single developer to tie into. That's why they wanted multiple ones, one for each dev.

ygouzerh5• 9 months ago

Yes, everyone forget to compute man-days in the cost calculation

tensor• 9 months ago

This thinking definitely drives enterprise products, and is exactly what makes it hard for small companies. "You can pay a lot simply because you clearly can afford to" doesn't lead to great products, even if it often does lead to profitable companies.

gregsadetsky25• 9 months ago

6 staging servers: main, dev, and any branches that you want to let other (non tech people) QA.

As for the staging servers, for each deployment, it was a mix of Performance-M dynos, multiple Standard dynos, RabbitMQ, a database large enough, etc. - it adds up quickly.

Finally, Idealist serves ~100k users per day - behind the product is a lot of boring tech that makes it reliable & fast. :-)

TechDebtDevin• 9 months ago

you're telling me 100k people are looking for jobs in non-profits on your specific site daily? Are you sure you don't have a bot/scraper problem?

marcosdumay3• 9 months ago

$3000/month = 36k/year

That's more than 1/3 of the cost of a developer there.

That will save you some week of a person's work to set things up and half-a-day every couple of months to keep it running. Rounding way up.

hinkley2• 9 months ago

The Real Insight: Staging Became a Free Commodity

Not free, it became a productivity boost.

You now have a $35k annual budget for the maintenance, other overhead, and lost productivity. What do you spend it on?

The team also took on responsibility for server monitoring, security updates, and handling any infrastructure issues themselves

For a place that’s paying devs $150k a year that might math out. It absolutely does not for places paying devs $250k+ a year.

One of the great frustrations of my mid career is how often people tried to bargain for more speed by throwing developers at my already late project when what would have actually helped almost immediately was more hardware and tooling. But that didn’t build my boss’ or his bosses’ empires. Don’t give me a $150k employee to train, give me $30k in servers.

Absolutely no surprise at all when devs were complicit with Cloud migrations because now you could ask forgiveness instead of permission for more hardware.

thomasfromcdnjs• 9 months ago

I know everyone in thread today is having fun embracing the hacker ethos and running things themselves.

But I've migrated plenty of companies off custom deployment setups to PAAS and told many ceo's simply what OP above has shared. Even a part time dev ops engineer is still $60000 a year, and that can buy us a LOT on PAAS. Using PAAS you can have effectively zero dev ops, I've also trained non technical people on how to scale their own servers if no devs are around because you just have a web based UI slider.

I consider myself a developer who cares more about the business, risk, profits and runway. A lot of developers don't share this mentality (which is fine btw always need engineers who like engineering for engineering sakes) but in meetings you will have a hard time beating me in an argument if you try to say that running servers ourselves would be "cheaper", and/or even faster, safer and definitely not more stable. (obviously not in all situations, but kind of most for modern crud web apps that don't require complicated compute setups)

I'm probably being overly antagonistic, forgive me for that, though highly recommend questioning the real cost of running your own setups.

hinkley2• 9 months ago

As a lead or principal dev you are constantly shuffling old problems off to new people so you can stay on top of new or broadening problems. It’s a lot easier to delegate problems if you’ve made them smaller during your watch. I’ve seen enough of the consequences of failure to delegate. But it takes a bit of self awareness to see how being a bottleneck affects other people while or after you are busy unblocking them.

Volunteering to be preempted by broken systems more often is a sucker’s bet. Solve problems so they stay solved. It’s more work now, but reduces the interest rate on past work so you can get new things done.

ygouzerh5• 9 months ago

Single server is very cheap for hobbyist.

Just something to consider if you are in a professional environment before switching your entire infra: maintenance cost is expensive. I strongly suggest to throw man-days in your cost calculation.

To prevent security vulnerabilities, the team will need to write some playbooks to auto-update regularly your machine, hoping for no breaking changes. Or instead write a pipeline for immutable OS images updates. And it often mean testing on an additional canary VM first.

Scaling up the VM from a compute point of view is not that straightforward as well, and will require depending of the provider either downtime or to migrate the entire deployments to a new instance.

Scaling from a disk size point of view, you will need to play with filesystems.

And depending on the setup you are using, you might have to manage lets encrypt, authentication and authorization, secrets vaults, etc (here at least Disco manages the SSL certs for you)

ebiester• 9 months ago

If you are large enough, you will need an ops team to manage allowing your developers to write terraform and manage AWS costs already.

If you are small enough, you are not going to be truly affected by downtime. If you are just a little bigger, a single hot spare is going to be sufficient.

The place where you get dinged is heavy growth in personnel and bandwidth. You end up needing to solve CPU bound activities quicker because it hurts the whole system. You need to start thinking about sticky round robin load balancing and other fun pieces.

This is where the cloud can allow you to trade money for velocity. Eventually, though, you will need to pay up.

That said, the average SaaS can go a long way with a single server per product.

bigstrat20032• 9 months ago

I strongly suggest to throw man-days in your cost calculation.

Only if those man-days actually incur a marginal cost. If it's just employees you already have spending their time on things, then it's not worth factoring in because it's a cost you pay regardless.

silversmith• 9 months ago

That's the case if said employees have nothing better to do and are currently twiddling their thumbs. Usually the server maintenance hours come out of project development hours.

It's precisely why we moved from a self-hosted demo environment server to heroku - the developers that had both the skills to manage a server and enough seniority to have access accross all the different projects could bring in more by building.

ygouzerh5• 9 months ago

If they are spending their time fiddling around disk resizing and package upgrades, it's time they are not spending helping deliver real business features.

This part can be outsourced to a PaaS company, so that the company engineers can be focused on what is the company actually making money from.

Tiberium• 9 months ago

The situation is interesting, and self-hosting is indeed a very nice solution often. However, I wanted to comment on the article itself - it seems to be very heavily AI-edited. Anyone who has spent time with LLMs will easily see it. But even that's not the issue; the main issue is that the article is basically a marketing piece.

For example, the "Bridging the Gap: Why Not Just Docker Compose?" section is a 1:1 copy of the points in the "Powerful simplicity" on the landing page - https://disco.cloud/

And this blog post is the (only) case study that they showcase on their main page.

AstroBen• 9 months ago

heh my first instinct was to go see how they're making money. Guess that's coming soon

gregsadetsky25• 9 months ago

You're absolutely right! Here are some three points why:

- ...

I'm kidding :-)

Our library is open source, and we're very happy and proud that Idealist is using us to save a bit of cash. Is it marketing if you're proud of your work? :-) Cheers

colechristensen4• 9 months ago

There's a tone issue.

Marketing should be marketing and clearly so. Tech blogs are about sharing information with the community (Netflix Tech blog is a good example) NOT selling something. Marketing masquerading as a tech blog is offputting to a lot of people. People don't like being fooled with embedded advertising and putting ad copy into such pieces is at best annoying.

https://netflixtechblog.com/

cirrus3• 9 months ago

This isn't the first time an article is also marketing. Besides, what is wrong with marketing something via a use case article? This is a fairly tame example of it and I found it an interesting and useful read, knowing full well it was also marketing.

jdprgm3• 9 months ago

It's funny they have this marketing blog post based on competing on price yet don't disclose any of their pricing on their site only a schedule a meeting which is just about the biggest RED FLAG on pricing there is.

gregsadetsky25• 9 months ago

Our library is open source, the price is 0!! :-) Haha

We're actually mostly talking to people (that "schedule a meeting") to see how we can help them migrate their stuff away (from Heroku, Vercel, etc.)

But we're not sure of the pricing model yet - probably Entreprise features like Gitlab does, while remaining open source. It's a tough(er) balance than running a hosted service where you can "just" (over)charge people.

tasuki• 9 months ago

But even that's not the issue; the main issue is that the article is basically a marketing piece.

Why is that an issue? Is it forbidden by HN guidelines? Or would you like all marketing to be marked as such? Which articles aren't marketing, one way or another?

speedgoose3• 9 months ago

Looking at the htop screenshot, I notice the lack of swap. You may want to enable earlyoom, so your whole server doesn't go down when a service goes bananas. The Linux Kernel OOM killer is often a bit too late to trigger.

You can also enable zram to compress ram, so you can over-provision like the pros'. A lot of long-running software leaks memory that compresses pretty well.

Here is how I do it on my Hetzner bare-metal servers using Ansible: https://gist.github.com/fungiboletus/794a265cc186e79cd5eb2fe... It also works on VMs.

cactusplant7374• 9 months ago

What's the performance hit from compressing ram?

speedgoose3• 9 months ago

I haven’t scientifically measured, but you don’t compress the whole ram. It is more about reserving a part of the ram to have very fast swap.

For an algorithm using the whole memory, that’s a terrible idea.

YouAreWRONGtoo2• 9 months ago

It's sometimes not a hit, because CPUs have caches and memory bandwidth is the limiting factor.

waynesonfire2• 9 months ago

zram, formerly called compcache, is a Linux kernel module for creating a compressed block device in RAM, i.e. a RAM disk with on-the-fly disk compression. The block device created with zram can then be used for swap or as a general-purpose RAM disk

To clarify OP's represention of the tool, it compresses swap space not resident ram. Outside of niche use-cases, compressing swap has overall little utility.

aidenn0• 9 months ago

Depends on the algorithm (and how much CPU is in use); if you have a spare CPU, the faster algorithms can more-or-less keep up with your memory bandwidth, making the overhead negligible.

And of course the overhead is zero when you don't page-out to swap.

levkk• 9 months ago

Yeah, no way. As soon as you hit swap, _most_ apps are going to have a bad, bad time. This is well known, so much so that all EC2 instances in AWS disable it by default. Sure, they want to sell you more RAM, but it's also just true that swap doesn't work for today's expectations.

Maybe back in the 90s, it was okay to wait 2-3 seconds for a button click, but today we just assume the thing is dead and reboot.

gchamonlive7• 9 months ago

How programs use ram also changed from the 90s. Back then they were written targeting machines that they knew would have a hard time fitting all their data in memory, so hitting swap wouldn't hurt perceived performance too drastically since many operations were already optimized to balance data load between memory and disk.

Nowadays when a program hits swap it's not going to fallback to a different memory usage profile that prioritises disk access. It's going to use swap as if it were actual ram, so you get to see the program choking the entire system.

henryfjordan• 9 months ago

Does HDD vs SSD matter at all these days? I can think of certain caching use-cases where swapping to an SSD might make sense, if the access patterns were "bursty" to certain keys in the cache

LaurensBER• 9 months ago

The beauty of ZRAM is that on any modern-ish CPU it's surprisingly fast. We're talking 2-3 ms instead of 2-3 seconds ;)

I regularly use it on my Snapdragon 870 tablet (not exactly a top of the line CPU) to prevent OOM crashes (it's running an ancient kernel and the Android OOM killer basically crashes the whole thing) when running a load of tabs in Brave and a Linux environment (through Tmux) at the same time.

ZRAM won't save you if you do actually need to store and actively use more than the physical memory but if 60% of your physical memory is not actively used (think background tabs or servers that are running but not taking requests) it absolutely does wonders!

On most (web) app servers I happily leave it enabled to handle temporary spikes, memory leaks or applications that load a whole bunch of resources that they never ever use.

I'm also running it on my Kubernetes cluster. It allows me to set reasonable strict memory limits while still having the certainty that Pods can handle (short) spikes above my limit.

bayindirh17• 9 months ago

This is a wrong belief because a) SSDs make swap almost invisible, so you can have that escape ramp if something goes wrong b) SWAP space is not solely an escape ramp which RAM overflows into anymore.

In the age of microservices and cattle servers, reboot/reinstall might be cheap, but in the long run it is not. A long running server, albeit being cattle, is always a better solution because esp. with some excess RAM, the server "warms up" with all hot data cached and will be a low latency unit in your fleet, given you pay the required attention to your software development and service configuration.

Secondly, Kernel swaps out unused pages to SWAP, relieving pressure from RAM. So, SWAP is often used even if you fill 1% of your RAM. This allows for more hot data to be cached, allowing better resource utilization and performance in the long run.

So, eff it, we ball is never a good system administration strategy. Even if everything is ephemeral and can be rebooted in three seconds.

Sure, some things like Kubernetes forces "no SWAP, period" policies because it kills pods when pressure exceeds some value, but for more traditional setups, it's still valuable.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 9 months ago

It's not just 3 seconds for a button click, every time I've run out of RAM on a Linux system, everything locks up and it thrashes. It feels like 100x slowdown. I've had better experiences when my CPU was underclocked to 20% speed. I enable swap and install earlyoom. Let processes die, as long as I can move the mouse and operate a terminal.

KaiserPro2• 9 months ago

Yeahna, thats just memory exhaustion.

Swap helps you use ram more efficiently, as you put the hot stuff in swap and let the rest fester on disk.

Sure if you overwhelm it, then you're gonna have a bad day, but thats the same without swap.

Seriously, swap is good, don't believe the noise.

zymhan• 9 months ago

Where on earth did you get this misconception?

akerl_4• 9 months ago

Is it possible you misread the comment you're replying to? They aren't recommending adding swap, they're recommending adjusting the memory tunables to make the OOM killer a bit more aggressive so that it starts killing things before the whole server goes to hell.

the8472• 9 months ago

YMMV. Garbage-collected/pointer-chasing languages suffer more from swapping because they touch more of the heap all the time. AWS suffers more from swap because EBS is ridiculously slow and even their instance-attached NVMe is capped compared physical NVMe sticks.

elwebmaster• 9 months ago

what an ignorant and clueless comment. Guess what? Todays disks are NVMe drives which are orders of magnitude faster than the 5400rpm HDDs of the 90s. Today's swap is 90s RAM.

slyall• 9 months ago

My 2cents is that in a lot of cases swap is being used for unimportant stuff leave more RAM for your app. Do a "ps aux" and look at all the RAM used by weird stuff. Good news is those things will be swapped out.

Example on my personal VPS

   $ free -m
                  total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
   Mem:            3923        1225         328         217        2369        2185
   Swap:           1535        1335         200

Dylan168073• 9 months ago

"as soon as you hit swap" is a bad way of looking at things. Looking around at some servers I run, most of them have .5-2GB of swap used despite a bunch of gigabytes of free memory. That data is never or almost never going to be touched, and keeping it in memory would be a waste. On a smaller server that can be a significant waste.

Swap is good to have. The value is limited but real.

Also not having swap doesn't prevent thrashing, it just means that as memory gets completely full you start dropping and re-reading executable code over and over. The solution is the same in both cases, kill programs before performance falls off a cliff. But swap gives you more room before you reach the cliff.

goodpoint• 9 months ago

No, swap is absolutely fine if used correctly.

Hendrikto• 9 months ago

This is well known

But also false. Swap is there so anonymous pages can be evicted. Not as a “slow overflow for RAM”, as a lot of people still believe.

By disabling swap you can actually *increase* thrashing, because the kernel is more limited in what it can do with the virtual memory.

AlexandrB• 9 months ago

Maybe back in the 90s, it was okay to wait 2-3 seconds for a button click, but today we just assume the thing is dead and reboot.

My experience is the exact opposite. If anything 2-3 second button clicks are more common than ever today since everything has to make a roundtrip to a server somewhere whereas in the 90s 2-3s button click meant your computer was about to BSOD.

Edit: Apple recently brought "2-3s to open tab" technology to Safari[1].

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1nm534e/sluggish_saf...

shrubble• 9 months ago

It's always a good idea to have a tiny amount of swap just in case. Like 1GB.

akerl_4• 9 months ago

Why?

dd_xplore• 9 months ago

I have also seen this in Androids (I tested this on multiple devices - S23U, OnePlus 6,8) , whenever I completely turned off the swap , the phone after a day or two of heavy usage would sometimes hang! It felt unintuitive since these devices had lot of RAM, and they shouldn't need swap . But turning off swap has always degraded performance for me.

awesome_dude6• 9 months ago

How do you get swap on a VPS?

justsomehnguy7• 9 months ago

Search "linux enable swap in a file"

    To enable a swap file in Linux, first create the swap file using a command like sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1G count=1 for a 1GB file. Then, set it up with sudo mkswap /swapfile and activate it using sudo swapon /swapfile. To make it permanent, add /swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0 to your /etc/fstab file.

Bender2• 9 months ago

Another option would be to have more memory that required over-engineer and to adjust the oom score per app, adding early kill weight to non critical apps and negative weight to important apps. oom_score_adj is already set to -1000 by OpenSSH for example.

    NSDJUST=$(pgrep -x nsd); echo -en '-378' > /proc/"${NSDJUST}"/oom_score_adj

Another useful thing to do is effecively disable over-commit on all staging and production servers (0 ratio instead of 2 memory to fully disable as these do different things, memory 0 still uses formula)

    vm.overcommit_memory = 0
    vm.overcommit_ratio = 0

Also use a formula to set min_free and reserved memory using a formula from Redhat that I do not have handy based on installed memory. min_free can vary from 512KB to 16GB depending on installed memory.

    vm.admin_reserve_kbytes = 262144
    vm.user_reserve_kbytes = 262144
    vm.min_free_kbytes = 1024000

At least that worked for me in about 50,000 physical servers for over a decade that were not permitted to have swap and installed memory varied from 144GB to 4TB of RAM. OOM would only occur when the people configuring and pushing code would massively over-commit and not account for memory required by the kernel. Not following best practices defined by Java and thats a much longer story.

Another option is to limit memory per application in cgroups but that requires more explaining than I am putting in an HN comment.

Another useful thing is to never OOM kill in the first place on servers that are only doing things in memory and need not commit anything to disk. So don't do this on a disked database. This is for ephemeral nodes that should self heal. Wait 60 seconds so drac/ilo can capture crash message and then earth shattering kaboom...

    # cattle vs kittens, mooooo...
    kernel.panic = 60
    vm.panic_on_oom = 2

For a funny side note, those options can also be used as a holy hand grenade to intentionally unsafely reboot NFS diskless farms when failing over to entirely different NFS server clusters. setting panic to 15 mins, triggering OOM panic by setting min_free to 16TB at the command line via Ansible not in sysctl.conf, swapping clusters, arp storm and reconverge.

liqilin15673• 9 months ago

Thanks for sharing I think these are very useful suggestions.

benterix2• 9 months ago

The lengths people will go to avoid k8s... (very easy on Hetzner Cloud BTW).

statictype• 9 months ago

Thanks for this. We resorted to setting ram thresholds in systemd.

Is earlyoom a better solution than that to prevent an erratic process from making an instance unresposnsive?

dboreham• 9 months ago

Haven't used swap since 2010.

TheDong3• 9 months ago

Even better than earlyoom is systemd-oomd[0] or oomd[1].

systemd-oomd and oomd use the kernel's PSI[2] information which makes them more efficient and responsive, while earlyoom is just polling.

earlyoom keeps getting suggested, even though we have PSI now, just because people are used to using it and recommending it from back before the kernel had cgroups v2.

[0] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...

[1] https://github.com/facebookincubator/oomd

[2] https://docs.kernel.org/accounting/psi.html

CGamesPlay5• 9 months ago

"earlyoom is just polling"?

systemd-oomd periodically polls PSI statistics for the system and those cgroups to decide when to take action.

It's unclear if the docs for systemd-oomd are incorrect or misleading; I do see from the kernel.org link that the recommended usage pattern is to use the `poll` system call, which in this context would mean "not polling", if I understand correctly.

speedgoose3• 9 months ago

Thanks, I will try that out.

geokon3• 9 months ago

Do you have any insight in to why this isn't included by default in distros like Ubuntu. It's kind of bewildering that the default behavior on Ubuntu is to just lock up the whole system on OOM

nurettin• 9 months ago

Of course swap should be enabled. But oom killer has always allowed access to an otherwise unreachable system. The pause is there so you can impress your junior padawan who rushed to you in a hurry.

cmurf• 9 months ago

Some workloads may do better with zswap. Cache is compressed, and pages evicted to disk based swap on an LRU basis.

The case of swap thrashing sounds like a misbehaving program, which can maybe be tamed by oomd.

System responsiveness though needs a complete resource control regime in place, that preserves minimum resources for certain critical processes. This is done with cgroupsv2. By establishing minimum resources, the kernel will limit resources for other processes. Sure, they will suffer. That’s the idea.

RobRivera• 9 months ago

To learn tricks like this what resource do you recommend I read? System administrators handbook? (Still on my TOREAD queue)

eitland• 9 months ago

"The practice of System and Network administration" by Tom Limoncelli and Christine Hogan[1] was, together with "Principles of Network and Systems Administration" by Mark Burgess have probably been the books that influenced my approach to sysadmin the most. I still have them. Between them they covered at a high level (at least back when I was sysadmin before devops and Kubernets etc) anything and everything from

- hardware, networks, monitoring, provisioning, server room locations in existing buildings, how to prepare server rooms

- and so on up to hiring and firing sysadmins, salary negotiations[2], vendor negotiations and the first book even had a whole chapter dedicated to "Being happy"

[1] There is a third author as well now, but those two were the ones that are on the cover of my book from 2005 and that I can remember

[2] Has mostly worked well after I more or less left sysadmin behind as well

bouncycastle• 9 months ago

sometimes swap seems to accumulate even though there is plenty of ram. It is too "greedy" by default, probably set for desktops not servers in mind.

Therefore it is better to always tune "vm.swappiness" to 1 in /etc/sysctl.conf

You can also configure your web server / TCP stack buffers / file limits so they never allocate memory over the physical ram available. (eg. in nginx you can setup worker/connection limits and buffer sizes.)

icetank• 9 months ago

Yeah I had a few servers look up on me without any clear way to recovery because some app was eating up ram. I am ok with the server coming to a crawl as soon as the swap has to be used but at least it won't stop responding all together.

tarruda• 9 months ago

Here is how I do it on my Hetzner bare-metal servers using Ansible: https://gist.github.com/fungiboletus/794a265cc186e79cd5eb2fe... It also works on VMs.

As someone with zero ansible experience, can you elaborate on why a yaml list is better than a simple shell script with comments before each command?

1vuio0pswjnm7• 9 months ago

"You may want to enable earlyoom, so your whole server doesn't go down when a service goes bananas."

Another option is to run BSD to avoid the Linux oom issue

For example, I'm not using Hetzner but I run NetBSD entirely from memory (no disk, no swap) and it never "went down" when out of memory

Looks like some people install FreeBSD and OpenBSD on Hetzner

https://gist.github.com/c0m4r/142a0480de4258d5da94ce3a2380e8...

https://computingforgeeks.com/how-to-install-freebsd-on-hetz...

https://web.archive.org/web/20231211052837if_/https://www.ar...

https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials/freebsd-openzfs-via-...

https://www.souji-thenria.net/posts/openbsd_hetzner/

https://web.archive.org/web/20220814124443if_/https://blog.v...

https://www.blunix.com/blog/how-to-install-openbsd-on-hetzne...

https://gist.github.com/ctsrc/9a72bc9a0229496aab5e4d3745af0b...

If it is possible to boot Hetzner from a BSD install image using "Linux rescue mode"^1 then it should also possible to run NetBSD entirely from memory using custom kernel

Every user is different but this is how I prefer to run UNIX-like OS for personal, recreational use; I find it more resilient

https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/troubleshoot...

https://blog.tericcabrel.com/hetzner-rescue-mode-unlock-serv...

https://github.com/td512/rescue

https://gainanov.pro/eng-blog/linux/hetzner-rescue-mode/

https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/servers/getting-started/rescu...

ChromeOS has an interesting approach to Linux oom issues. Not sure it has ever been discussed on HN

https://github.com/dct2012/chromeos-3.14/raw/chromeos-3.14/m...

999900000999• 9 months ago

Two question.

What's in it for Disco ?

What's the pricing ?

How many work hours per month does keeping this thing stable take.

If it takes over 15 Heroku is cheaper.

Hosting with bare metal is still expensive, you pay in other ways.

jf93ap29sh• 9 months ago

Cool to hear on the savings. But now the team has to maintain two different deployment models, so you have account for the ongoing cost that your team now has to own and maintain two different processes of deployment (prod & staging).

The key element here is the need to continuously exercise both processes (Heroku + your staging server), to work out both processes & maintain familiarity on both.

Depending on the amount of staff involved in the above, it might eclipse the compute savings, but only OP knows those details. I'm sure they are a smart bunch.

Havoc3• 9 months ago

Good improvement, but 50x overpayment until a rethink is also pretty wild.

gregsadetsky25• 9 months ago

From having talked to many folks, migrations are psychologically very, very, very very hard.

At least, the "fear" factor (will the new system work? what bugs will it introduce? how much time will I spend, etc.) pushes a lot of folks to accept a very big price differential aka known knowns versus unknowns...

It's understandable really. It's just that once you've migrated, you almost definitely never want to go back :-)

Havoc3• 9 months ago

On software stack I definitely get the fear.

...but this CX33 "server" being discussed - is a 6 bucks a month VPS [0]

Normally you build a prototype on laptop and move it out to fat hardware when it outgrows that. Here they started with 3k infra and then later realized it runs on toaster. Completely back to front.

Maybe they just never iterated on a local version and nobody developed an intuition for requirements. Switched straight to iterating on a nebulous cloud where you can't tell how much horsepower is behind the cloudfunctions etc.

Presumably there is a perfectly reasonably explanation and it's just not spelled out, it just seems weird based on given info

[0] https://www.hetzner.com/cloud

atonse2• 9 months ago

Exactly. For most people, even at $500/month, yes it might be painful but is still dwarfed by the cost of engineer time. And it's also one of those "let's kick the can down the road, everything's working right now, do we want the headache of potentially destabilizing things"

But this is also one of those things where, almost invariably after you do it, you think "Oh man, we should've done this 3 years ago!!! It just ended up taking a day and everything's working beautifully"

pentacent_hq2• 9 months ago

Cool project!

From looking at your docs, it appears like using and connecting GitHub is a necessary prerequisite for using Disco. Is that correct? Can disco also deploy an existing Docker image in a registry of my choosing without a build step? (Something like this with Kamal: `kamal --skip-push --version latest`)

gregsadetsky25• 9 months ago

Correct, GitHub is necessary at this point to deploy code.

However, yes, you can ask Disco to fetch an existing Docker image (we use that to self-host RabbitMQ). An example of deploying Meilisearch's image is here [0] with the tutorial here [1].

Do you typically build your Docker images and push them to a registry? Curious to learn more about your deployment process.

[0] https://github.com/letsdiscodev/sample-meilisearch/blob/main...

[1] https://disco.cloud/docs/deployment-guides/meilisearch

pentacent_hq2• 9 months ago

Yes, I try to keep my CI pipelines somewhat platform-agnostic so even though I'm mostly using GitHub, my workflow is typically to first build a Docker image and push it to a registry, then use Kamal to deploy that image.

jdprgm3• 9 months ago

Just saw Nate Berkopec who does a lot of rails performance stuff posting about the same idea yesterday saying Heroku is 25-50x price for performance which is so insane. They clearly have zero interest in competing on price.

It's a shame they don't just license all their software stack at a reasonable price with a similar model like Sidekiq and let you sort out actually decent hardware. It's insane to consider Heroku if anything has gotten more expensive and worse compared to a decade ago yet in comparison similar priced server hardware has gotten WAY better of a decade. $50 for a dyno with 1 GB of ram in 2025 is robbery. It's even worse considering running a standard rails app hasn't changed dramatically from a resources perspective and if anything has become more efficient. It's comical to consider how many developers are shipping apps on Heroku for hundreds of dollars a month on machines with worse performance/resources than the macbook they are developing it on.

It's the standard playback that damn near everything in society is going for though just jacking prices and targeting the wealthiest least price sensitive percentiles instead of making good products at fair prices for the masses.

czhu122• 9 months ago

It's a shame they don't just license all their software stack at a reasonable price with a similar model like Sidekiq and let you sort out actually decent hardware

We built and open sourced https://canine.sh for exactly that reason. There’s no reason PaaS providers should be charging such a giant markup over already marked up cloud providers.

nicoburns• 9 months ago

This looks decent for what it is. I feel like there are umpteen solutions for easy self-hosted compute (and tbh even a plain Linux VM isn't too bad to manage). The main reason to use a PAAS provider is a managed database with built-in backups.

odie55339• 9 months ago

Does it run Sentry and I can send logs, metrics, and traces to it, and the queries are fast?

altairprime• 9 months ago

Heroku is pricing for “# of FTE headcount that can be terminated for switching to Heroku”; in that sense, this article’s $3000/mo bill is well below 1.0 FTE/month at U.S. pricing, so it’s not interesting to Heroku to address. I’m not defending this pricing lens, but it’s why their pricing is so high: if you aren’t switching to Heroku to layoff at least 1-2 FTE of salary per billing period, or using Heroku to replace a competitor’s equivalent replacement thereof, Heroku’s value assigned to you as a customer is net negative and they’d rather you went elsewhere. They can’t slam the door shut on the small fry, or else the unicorns would start up elsewhere, but they can set the pricing in FTE-terms and VCs will pay it for their moonshots without breaking a sweat.

sreekanth850• 9 months ago

Canine looks cool man.

teiferer3• 9 months ago

It's insane how much my local shop charges for an oil change, I can do it much cheaper myself!

It's insane how much a restaurant charges for a decent steak, I can do it much cheaper myself!

...!

jdprgm3• 9 months ago

I know you mean this sarcastically but I actually 100% agree with this particular on the steak point. Especially with beef prices at all time record highs and restaurant inflation being out of control post pandemic. It takes so much of the enjoyment out of things for me if I feel i'm being ripped off left and right.

andrewstuart2• 9 months ago

This argument doesn't work with such commoditized software. It's more like comparing an oil change for $100 plus an hour of research and a short drive against a convenient oil change right next door for $2,500.

xmprt• 9 months ago

Not the best comment but I agree with the sentiment. I fear far too often, people complain about price when there are competitors/other cheaper options that could be used with a little more effort. If people cared so much then they should just use the alternative.

No one gets hurt if someone else chooses to waste their money on Heroku so why are people complaining? Of course it applies in cases where there aren't a lot of competitors but there are literally hundreds of different of different options for deploying applications and at least a dozen of them are just as reliable and cheaper than Heroku.

g8oz• 9 months ago

The price value proposition here seems similar to that of a stadium hot dog.

raincole• 9 months ago

It's just trendy to bash cloud and praise on-premises in 2025. In a few years that will turn around. Then in another few years it will turn around again.

artifaxx• 9 months ago

Indeed, there are levels to the asymmetry though. Oil change might be ~5x cheaper vs the 20-50x claimed for Heroku...

landdate• 9 months ago

for an oil change, I can do it much cheaper myself

Really? I mean oil changes are pretty cheap. You can get an oil change at walmart for like 40 bucks.

layoric3• 9 months ago

$50 for a dyno with 1 GB of ram in 2025 is robbery

AWS isn't much better honestly.. $50/month gets you an m7a.medium which is 1 vCPU (not core) and 4GB of RAM. Yes that's more memory but any wonder why AWS is making money hand-over-fist..

electroly2• 9 months ago

m7a doesn't use HyperThreading; 1 vCPU is a full dedicated core.

To compare to Heroku's standard dynos (which are shared hosting) you want the t3a family which is also shared, and much cheaper.

bearjaws• 9 months ago

That is assuming you need that 1 core 24/7, you can get 2 core / 8gb for $43, this will most likely fit 90% of workloads (steady traffic with spikes, or 9-5 cadence).

If you reserve that instance you can get it for 40% cheaper, or get 4 cores instead.

Yes it's more expensive than OVH but you also get everything AWS to offer.

selcuka2• 9 months ago

Not sure if it's an apples-to-apples comparison with Heroku's $50 Standard-2X dyno, but an Amazon Lightsail instance with 1GB of RAM and 2 vCPUs is $7/month.

troyvit• 9 months ago

This, plus as a backup plan going from Heroku to AWS wouldn't necessarily solve the problem, at least with our infra. When us-east-1 went down this week so did Heroku for us.

NohatCoder• 9 months ago

AWS certainly also does daylight robbery. In the AWS model the normal virtual servers are overpriced, but not super overpriced.

Where they get you is all the ancillary shit, you buy some database/backup/storage/managed service/whatever, and it is priced in dollars per boogaloo, you also have to pay water tax on top, and of course if you use more than the provisioned amount of hafnias the excess ones cost 10x as much.

Most customers have no idea how little compute they are actually buying with those services.

condiment• 9 months ago

Jacked up prices isn't what is happening here. There is a psychological effect that Heroku and other cloud vendors are (wittingly or unwittingly) the beneficiary of. Customer expectations are anchored in the price they pay when they start using the service, and without deliberate effort, those expectations change in _linear_ fashion. Humans think in linear terms, while actual compute hardware improvements are exponential.

Heroku's pricing has _remained the same_ for at least seven years, while hardware has improved exponentially. So when you look at their pricing and see a scam, what you're actually doing is comparing a 2025 anchor to a mid-2010s price that exists to retain revenue. At the big cloud vendors, they differentiate customers by adding obstacles to unlocking new hardware performance in the form of reservations and updated SKUs. There's deliberate customer action that needs to take place. Heroku doesn't appear to have much competition, so they keep their prices locked and we get to read an article like this whenever a new engineer discovers just how capable modern hardware is.

rtpg• 9 months ago

I mean Heroku is also offering all of the ancillary stuff around their product. It's not literally "just" hosting. It's pretty nice to not have to manage a kube cluster, to get stuff like ephemeral QA envs and the like, etc....

Heroku has obviously stagnated now but their stack is _very cool_ for if you have a fairly simple system but still want all the nice parts of a mode developed ops system. It almost lets you get away with not having an ops team for quite a while. I don't know any other provider that is low-effort "decent" ops (Fly seems to directionally want to be new Heroku but is still missing a _lot_ in my book, though it also has a lot)

sofixa• 9 months ago

other cloud vendors

To be fair, AWS quite proudly talk about all the times they've lowered prices on existing services, or have introduced new generations that are cheaper (e.g. their Graviton EC2 instances).

tonyhart75• 9 months ago

Yeah, I choose railway app for my PaaS hosting for this reason

herval• 9 months ago

Heroku is the Vercel of Rails: people will pay a fortune for it simply because it works. This has always been their business model, so it’s not really a new development. There’s little competition since the demand isn’t explosive and the margin is thin, so you end up with stagnation

echelon• 9 months ago

Vercel should have a ton of competition on account of the frontend space being much larger than Heroku's market.

Netlify sets the same prices.

Just throw it into a cloud bucket from CI and be done with it.

Onavo2• 9 months ago

I am not sure what's there to license. The hard and expensive part is in the labor to keep everything running. You are paying to make DevSecOps Somebody Else's Problem. You are paying for A Solution. You are not paying for software. There are plenty of Heroku clones mentioned in this thread.

__mharrison__3• 9 months ago

Now I know why the teaching platform I use is trying to kick me off...

Every other time I login to the admin site I get a Heroku error.

varispeed• 9 months ago

Why people discover it only today? I remember making comments about it years ago.

I even shown one customer that their elaborate cluster costing £10k a month could run on a £10 vps faster and with less headache (they set it up for "big data" thinking 50GB is massive. There was no expectation of the database growing substantially beyond that).

Their response? Investors said it must run on the cloud, because they don't want to lose their money if homegrown setup goes down.

So there is that.

Nemo_bis2• 9 months ago

Yes. The "cloud" is sold on grounds of "efficiency" but really it's just an ideological decision to increase outsourcing and reduce the employees' bargaining power.

(Except this backfires, because a service running on a RHEL or Debian machine might go on for 5-10 years untouched without any particular issue, security aside, while anything relying on kubernetes or the hyperscaler's million little services needs to be tweaked every 6 months and re-engineered every few years or it will completely stop working.)

cpursley4• 9 months ago

Any Elixir/Gleam/Erlang (distributed) support?

gregsadetsky25• 9 months ago

I don't know! I do see a Docker image for Elixir, so I'm pretty sure that would work. But the distributed aspect is harder to answer right now.

How do you typically deploy this?

cpursley4• 9 months ago

Render (because it's on k8s) and Fly handle distributed erlang out of the box, so I don't have to think much about it. Heroku does not.

codyb• 9 months ago

Amazing to see this article in 2025. Feel like it's 2015 all over again!

merelysounds• 9 months ago

The article's title seems inaccurate - as far as I understood there never was a $3000/mo bill; there was a $500/(mo,instance) staging setup that has been rightly optimized to $55/mo before running six instances.

Critically, all staging environments would share a single "good enough" Postgres instance directly on the server, eliminating the need for expensive managed database add-ons that, on Heroku, often cost more than the dynos themselves.

Heroku also has cheaper managed database add-ons, why not use something like that for staging? The move to self hosting might still make sense, my point is that perhaps the original staging costs of $500/mo could have been lower from the start.

gregsadetsky25• 9 months ago

I answered elsewhere with the list of dynos, but the short version is that between the list of services that each deployment required, and the size of the database, it truly (and unfortunately) did end up costing $500 per staging.

cantalopes• 9 months ago

I don't mean to hate but i find it incredibly alarming that i'm lately seeing all the seemingly seniorly positioned people writing articles about how they just realized that you can actually just buy a vps, setup a deployment workflow and write a revealing blog about "drastically cutting costs".

It's like juniors who did not recieve a proper training/education got hired into companies where someone told them to go serverless on some heroku or vercel, or use some incredibly expensive aws service because that's a "modern correct way" to do it, except now they were a developer for long enough to get a "senior" title in their job title now are in positions of actually modelling this architecture themselves

atonse2• 9 months ago

As one of those people who's experiencing this now (I'm a person who's worked in this industry for 25 years and done everything from colocated servers, to VMs, to VPS's, to AWS/GCP, and now going back to VPS/dedicated), I can tell you it's more of a boiling frog situation. The number of servers slowly grows over time and before you know it, you're spending way more than you really thought about.

At a certain scale (or when you do more custom dev), you just don't prioritize it because it's a blip in your financials compared to salaries. And it's not worth spending what might be thousands (or tens of thousands) of dollars of engineering and testing effort to migrate off, when there are other priorities.

And one day you (in our case) realize that you're spending $600/month between Linode/AWS/Fly/Render (cuz we experimented a lot), claude code can help you with some of the stuff, and you want to consolidate it all back to the olden days where you just had 2-3 servers paying a total of $60-75 a month . But you still have to set aside probably a day or two to do it (no longer a couple sprints). So then the math works out where we make that money back within a few months.

So that's where I am at the moment.

ksajadi• 9 months ago

It is clear that Heroku is not interested in reducing their prices. But I don’t think this is a Heroku problem. Vercel is also the same, which makes me think there is a fundamental issue with the PaaS business model that stops it from competing on price while the commoditised part their business (data centers) are always reducing their prices.

The challenge I always face with homebrew PaaS solutions is that you always end up moving from managing your app to managing your PaaS.

This might not be true right now but as complexity of your app grows it’s almost always the eventual outcome.

IshKebab2• 9 months ago

On the other hand for $3k/month you can just hire someone to do it for you (part time at least, but I doubt it's remotely a full-time job).

shdh2• 9 months ago

Heroku and Vercel don’t ever have any intention of competing on price

They offer convenience

digianarchist• 9 months ago

It’s not just convenience. This single box is a single point of failure.

afro88• 9 months ago

Doesn't staging need to be a (downsized) replica of prod, infra wise to give confidence that changes will be stable and working in prod?

Genuine question.

Ayesh• 9 months ago

Yes, I'm just as curious as you on _why_ does a staging setup needs the same amount of resources as prod.

All of my staging setups are on a ~$15 Hetzner server, with a GitHub Action to `docker compose build && docker compose up -d` remotely, with an Apache service with a wildcard certificate and dynamic host names. We have 3..n staging setups, with each PR spinning up a new staging site just for that PR.

It's been working with us for years, for a team of 10 developers.

iamjs• 9 months ago

Bridging the Gap: Why Not Just Docker Compose?

The draw of a docker-compose-like interface for deployment is so alluring that I have spent the last year or so working on a tool called Defang that takes a compose file and deploys it to the cloud. We don't support Hetzner (yet), but we do support AWS, GCP, and DO. We provision networking, IAM, compute, database, secrets, etc in your cloud account, so you maintain full control, but you also get the ergonomics of compose.

If you are on a PaaS and you want to reduce cost without losing ergonomics and scalability, it might be interesting.

pier252• 9 months ago

Can anyone comment on how Disco compares to Dokku?

plehoux• 9 months ago

Congrats Greg & Antoine! disco.cloud is really needed, I hope you guys get the visibility you deserve and some momentum from the community!

outside1234• 9 months ago

It is absolutely nuts to me that this machine:

AMD Ryzen™ 7 3700X CPU 8 cores / 16 threads @ 3.6 GHz Generation: Matisse (Zen2) RAM 64 GB DDR4 ECC

Drives 4 x 22 TB HDD 2 x 1 TB SSD

is only 104 euros a month on Hetzner.

The STORAGE alone would cost $1624 a month in most clouds

Joel_Mckay• 9 months ago

The connection count costs also balloon on most cloud providers (any busy protocol like telemetry or log-consolidation costs can be huge.)

If your group pushes over 23TiB/Month, than most usually look for un-metered colo hosts, and or CDN services with your resource integrity Attribute tags set.

Cloud makes sense for small IT shops that can't afford a fully staffed team. The general rule is a 5:1 labor to hardware cost amortized over 3 years.

AWS was successful as IT had enormous upfront costs most people found difficult to justify, and data-centers could absorb a DDoS that would be expensive to mitigate.

Rule #17: "Only forward meaningful data at every layer of a design, as it often naturally ensures a feasible convergent behavior."

There are a number of great options, but depends on the use-cases. =3

morshu9001• 9 months ago

I like Heroku for my needs but have noticed oddities in the pricing that can make a small app cost much more than a differently arranged large app.

hu32• 9 months ago

Very cool project. Is there an overview of the architecture? Perhaps a diagram or some drawing?

I mean something like a list of moving parts so I can understand how it works. Perhaps something like this:

https://caprover.com/#:~:text=CapRover%20Architecture%20at%2...

gregsadetsky25• 9 months ago

Although LLM generated, https://deepwiki.com/letsdiscodev/disco-daemon is pretty impressive and has some arch diagrams. But I fully agree, we should have that on the site.

Once everything is installed/running, a very tldr diagram would be:

GitHub (webhook on git push) -> Docker swarm running Caddy -> Disco Daemon REST API which will ask Docker to build the image, and then does a blue-green zero-time deployment swap

But yeah, a clearer/better diagram would be great. Thanks for the push!

hu32• 9 months ago

Fair enough. That LLM generated doc was surprisingly educational.

And your description is a great macro view of it. Thanks!

joshfraser• 9 months ago

I love the convenience of Heroku but hate their predatory pricing. Who's fixing this?

gregsadetsky25• 9 months ago

You have your range of options - it depends on the size of your team, the kind of apps you're running, etc. The answer can be anything from an "ssh script" to AWS (or K8S), etc.

If you're running something that's too expensive for your taste and can share more information, happy to brainstorm some options.

stickfigure• 9 months ago

AWS Elastic Beanstalk gives you more or less the same experience but charges you normal EC2 instance pricing. It's as cheap as PaaS gets.

pier252• 9 months ago

Fly was supposed to fix Heroku but my bill more than doubled since they changed how they charge for shared CPUs.

https://community.fly.io/t/cpu-quotas-update/23473

anurag• 9 months ago

I work at Render (render.com); we have over 4 million developers on the platform, and we've migrated many large (and small) Heroku customers over because of our more modern capabilities and scalable pricing.

https://render.com/docs/migrate-from-heroku

Uptrenda• 9 months ago

Might as well ask this: anyone know any server provides that are like half the cost of hetzner. I know that's asking a lot but still.

gregsadetsky25• 9 months ago

I think that https://lowendbox.com/ might be a good place to start looking for that

dabinat• 9 months ago

Netcup is cheaper than Hetzner, but it doesn’t have some of the other features and reviews are mixed.

selcuka2• 9 months ago

I have been using RackNerd for a few non-critical, hobby projects and can't fault them.

Their advertised prices are not half of Hetzner, but you can find hidden deals if you do a Google search, or via sites like https://racknerdtracker.com (no affiliation).

IgorPartola• 9 months ago

I was looking on Hetzner after that recent article and their server marketplace has $34/month server that had something like an Intel Core i7 with 64GB RAM and 2x512GB SSDs. Compare that to EC2 pricing.

cosmin800• 9 months ago

It is hilarious, don't get me wrong - I really appreciate more people moving away from these "Hi-Tech" deployment styles and cloud services and the rest, but it is like rediscovering hot water.

shdh2• 9 months ago

Heroku is cool in that it helps you get running and autoscaled, but it would be much cheaper for anyone with traffic to just get a dedicated box

bilsbie2• 9 months ago

What’s the best alternative to heroku today for someone that doesn’t want to do any sysadmin and just dump a Django site and database somewhere?

pbalau• 9 months ago

Any place you can get a vps from.

bilsbie2• 9 months ago

Won’t there be ongoing OS updates, database updates etc? If there’s a new security hole do I have to run to a computer and run a patch, etc?

I just want someone else handling all that.

jasoncartwright• 9 months ago

Any VPS you fancy that fits the price/performance/location/support you want, then point Coolify/Dokploy/whatever at it.

I did just this using Coolify, Mythic Beasts running Django & Postgres the other month from Google App Engine. Hilariously easy, even with my extremely rusty skills.

evantbyrne2• 9 months ago

It is worth learning to use Docker Swarm. Deployments are as simple as pushing a new container to your registry and running one command. I built a free CLI tool rove.dev that simplifies provisioning and does service diffing.

Either that or use a PaaS that deploys to VMs. Can't make recommendations here but you could start by looking at Semaphore, Dokku, Dokploy.

sebnun• 9 months ago

I'm looking for simple k8s alternatives like docker swarm and kamal. Rove looks really interesting.

gomoboo• 9 months ago

PythonAnywhere: https://www.pythonanywhere.com/

qingcharles• 9 months ago

Oracle has free VPS if your requirements aren't huge. Hobby project etc.

andoando• 9 months ago

Whats wrong with just spinning up a server on hetzner. At most you need to setup nginx and a systemctl service

system24• 9 months ago

I think the bar has been lowered since ChatGPT started instructing people to do things. This question about Python wouldn't even have come up 10 years ago.

lpellis• 9 months ago

https://render.com/ is probably the closest, I'm really enjoying using them. Workflow is the same as heroku, but cheaper, no nightly restarts, supports new python versions etc..

qazxcvbnmlp• 9 months ago

I use Render, spend remarkably little time doing devops. Its fantastic

clouseauinsp• 9 months ago

I love these types of stories. Please submit more of this type.

Bring back sanity to tech.

monster_truck• 9 months ago

Heroku's pricing is wild. About a decade ago I just about fell out of my chair when I found out the startup I was at was burning upwards of $10k/mo just to generate QR codes (made out of html tables so that they would reliably display in emails). It worked out to something like $0.15/code

The lead who wrote it had never even profiled code before, after some changes we cut it down to ~$0.01/per, but that's still insane.

bapak• 9 months ago

What in the world?? Surely there must be something more than "generate a HTML page with 500 elements". Any edge cloud hosting lets you do that for free.

system24• 9 months ago

Were you not caching things and using a basic generator? Your comment really doesn't make any sense to me, no offense.

objektif3• 9 months ago

Sounds like they were generating codes with pure html not images.

st3fan• 9 months ago

Uhh a “multi-gigabyte Postgres database” is not “substantial”

vietvu• 9 months ago

Quite sad to see devs nowadays has lost abilities to self-host. I know it can be overwhelming with Linux, networking, db, backup, hardware load.... However, it's not rocket science!

tonyhart75• 9 months ago

noo UI???? I mean we already have coolify and dokploy that doing the same for more

but glad we have new product offering for this

gregsadetsky25• 9 months ago

We do have a UI, we're just so behind on the documentation, it's not even funny ha.

If you setup a server with the curl|sh install script on the homepage, you'll get a url at the end that directs you there. And you can use the CLI too of course.

But yeah, thanks for the reminder!

ThinkBeat• 9 months ago

Hosting staging on a fundamentally different architecture and resources than prod (and dev I think) is a disater waiting to happen.

Unless they plan to move prod and dev as well, and using staging now as a test platform.

Once few problems glitch when moving to prod, they may no longer think they are saving much money.

hshdhdhehd• 9 months ago

3000 to 55? Par for the course.

$55 server

$550 aws server

$3000 aws based paas server

Nemo_bis2• 9 months ago

And while Hetzner's price-performance is exceptional, its limited presence in the US was a consideration; for this staging workload, it wasn't an issue, but it's a factor for production services targeting US users.

What is this referring to? Concerns about capacity if you need to scale up quickly? Or just "political"/marketing considerations about people not being used to being served by a Hetzner server?

archon810• 9 months ago

Latency to the US from Europe?

kristianp• 9 months ago

From memory there aren't many dedicated servers available in the US.

andmarios• 9 months ago

I guess it's latency and data residency.

gregsadetsky25• 9 months ago

Correct! Re: latency, as I just noted elsewhere, if you run your prod database using Crunchy Bridge or Supabase or another big provider (which you absolutely should for prod), that typically means that your db will be running within an AWS region. You would, in most cases, need to run your compute in the same region. So yeah, at that point, Hetzner would be out.

jeandejean• 9 months ago

Having been in the industry for 20 years, I can remember we were processing high loads with... Algorithms. It wasn't a cloud cost saving initiative back then, but a necessity if you had scale, you could just not throw money at scaling. Feels like we shifted optimization from algorithms to cloud costs savings...

chickensong9• 9 months ago

Not just cloud costs. Look at how insanely powerful modern hardware is, yet software performance is... questionable. At least some of us have fast internet to download those 50mb js bundles before a web page loads.

iDontThink2• 9 months ago

wow, who have would thought that setting up your own infra instead of paying for it is cheaper.

iDontThink2• 9 months ago

Wow, who would have thought that setting your own infra would bring the costs down and more control over it ?

Copenjin• 9 months ago

Heroku never made sense, that convenience costs too much.

nklswhl• 9 months ago

I like that this post and the migration focus solely on staging. Far too often, people report how much money they saved by migrating from Heroku/Render/Fly to a VPS with Coolify/Dokploy/Kamal. What these calculations usually fail to take into account is the additional management and maintenance effort required. While this is fine for side projects and non-critical parts (such as staging/preview environments), it represents a significant burden for productive environments with business-critical services. In this case, a correct and understandable decision was made. Thanks for sharing!

jacob-s-son• 9 months ago

It’s all fine and dandy, but I wonder why so little discussion around this (mainly high-level comments “DBs are hard”?

disco provides a "good enough" Postgres addon.
This addon is a great way to quickly setup a database when Postgres is not mission critical to your system. If you need any non-basic features, like replication, automatic failover, monitoring, automatic backups and restore, etc. you should consider using a managed Postgres provider, such as Neon or Supabase.

How come automatic backups is considered an “advanced” feature?

Also I can’t think of a single application since 2012 that I have worked on that did not have a secondary/follower instance deployed. Also suggesting Neon and friends is fine, but I wonder what is your average latency, Hetzner does not have direct connection to the DCs these databases are hosted.

gregsadetsky25• 9 months ago

Backups are only advanced in the context of our Postgres being "Good" enough (maybe our built-in Posgres could be called "Barely enough" but that sounds a bit lame) :-)

I fully agree with you though, it's table stakes (unintended pun!) for any prod deployment, just as read-only followers, etc. Our biggest, most important point, is that folks should be using real dbs hosted by people who know what they're doing. The risk/reward ratio is out of whack in terms of doing it yourself.

And finally, re Hetzner and cross-DC latency, that's unfortunately a very good issue that we had to plan for in another case - specifically, a customer using Supabase (which is AWS-based). The solution was to simply use an EC2 machine in the same region. Thankfully, some db providers end up being explicit about which AWS region they run in - and obviously, using AWS RDS is also an option! It's definitely a consideration.

Fanmade• 9 months ago

Reminds me of my current customer. We (another freelancer and me) built an application that replaced an Excel sheet, which was the foundation of the business until then. So the usual so far.

We have a policy that our customers are responsible for all their business-related input, but we make the decisions about the technical implementation. Every technical decision that the customer wants to make basically costs extra.

In this case we built a rather simple multi-tenancy B2B app using Laravel, with one database per tenant. They planned to start with a single customer/tenant, scaling up to maybe a few dozen within the next years, with less than a hundred concurrent users over the first five years. There were some processes with a little load, but they were few, running less that a minute each and already built up to run asynchronous.

We planned a single Hetzner instance and to scale up as soon as we would see it reaching its limits. So less than 100 €/month.

The customer told us that they have a cooperation with their local hosting provider (with "special conditions!") and that they wanted to use them instead.

My colleague did all the setup, because he is more experienced in that, but instead of our usual five-minute-setup in Forge (one of the advantages of the Laravel ecosystem), it took several weeks with the hosting provider, where my colleague had to invest almost full time just for the deployment. The hosting provider "consulted" out customer to invest in a more complex setup with a load balancer in front, to be able to scale right away. They also took very long for each step, like providing IP addresses or to handle the SSL certificates.

We are very proud of our very fast development process and having to work with that hosting provider cost us about one third of our first development phase for the initial product.

It's been around two years since then. While the software still works as intended, the customer could not grow as expected. They are still running with only one single tenant (basically themselves) and the system barely had to handle more than two concurrent users. The customer recently accidentally mentioned that they pay almost 1000€/month for the hosting alone. But it scales!

gregsadetsky25• 9 months ago

Super interesting, and truly unfortunate when that happens! Just thinking about having to wait for SSL certificates like in the old days (versus Let's Encrypt) would frustrate me to no end.

Forge seems like a great integrated solution (I subscribe to their newsletter and their product updates seem quite frequent and useful). What's been your experience with them? Any particular things you like, or dislike about them?

I'm also curious when you talk about scaling up Forge - is that something you've done, and is that generally easy to do?

Thanks a lot!

wiether• 9 months ago

I can only sympathize here because I have those exact issues with some of our customers

They don't want our hosting solutions but insist on using their own hosting partners

The result are similar:

- its at least five times more expensive on pure hosting costs

- we lose a considerable amount of time dealing with the hosting partner (which we bill to the customer)

- it's always a security nightmare, either because they put so much "safety protections" in place that it's unusable (think about the customer wanting an Internet-facing website, but the servers are private...) or because they don't put any safety settings in place so the servers are regularly taken down through awfully simple exploits (think about SSH root access with "passw0rd" as password...)

- customer keep complaining about performances to us, but what can you do when the servers are sharing a 100Mbps connection, or the filesystem is on an NFS with <20Mbps bandwidth

collinmanderson3• 9 months ago

Yes. For these reasons I now have a policy that if you want me maintaining your website / web app, then I manage the hosting. I use something I'm familiar with that I know works.

zelphirkalt• 9 months ago

This smells a lot like IONOS. They can put their certifications where the light doesn't shine. 10x the cost, really baaad provisioning API and bottlenecks, broken OS images, useless support...

belorn• 9 months ago

Local hosting can make sense. Being able to drive to your provider and talk to them in person is quite valuable, and if you want to get the highest support tier from a large cloud provider you will often pay several times more compared to the same service with no support, assuming you are a large enough customer that they are willing to sell it. Cooperation with local businesses can also result in some fair amount of additional sales (sending customer to each other, buying services from each other, word of mouth, ectra), so the product cost may not represent the complete picture.

Local hosting can also be comparing apple with oranges. A local data center that provide a physical machine is very different from a cloud provider, especially if that cloud is located in a different continent and under different jurisdictions. Given that they were providing SSL certificates, was this a local php webshop? Data centers should be a bit more proficient with things like IP addresses and setting up any cast, but less so in providing help with php or certificates, and if they sell that it may not be their area of expertise.

What prevented them from scaling to more tenants?

abdellah123• 9 months ago

With hetzner AX162-s [1], 1TB DDR5, ($600/month) you can load your freaking database in Memory and not blink !! I don't understand why people go to cloud.

[1] https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax162-s/configu...

system24• 9 months ago

<3 Hetzner

dirkc• 9 months ago

I'd like to nit-pick a little about the title.

They replaced a $500/mo bill with a $55/mo server. And at the same time increased what they could do before - run 5 extra staging environments!

While saving $445/mo isn't nothing, in my book enabling teams to freely run the staging environments they need is the real win here! Limiting testing resources can be a real drag on momentum in a project!

pikzel• 9 months ago

And they're now running all environments on a single machine! The bigger blast radius the better, right? Right...?

h33t-l4x0r2• 9 months ago

Hetzner is flaky though, you can't trust them. You don't want your website taken down because they decided something is suspicious and they randomly banned you without warning.

JrProgrammer2• 9 months ago

<Insert every cloud provider here>. There are countless posts on HN that describe people and businesses being blocked by a cloud provider like GCP. Hetzner is by all means not an outlier.

h33t-l4x0r2• 9 months ago

They are for me. Got banned and received the explanation that my actual billing details were suspicious (there was nothing suspicious other than possibly my geolocation which is SE Asia). I asked them to clarify and they declined.

Signed up with Contabo without incident and have been a happy customer ever since.

Look, whether or not Hetzner chose to block me out of blatant geo-racism is not at issue here, I wouldn't want to do business with them either way since they declined to give me a reasonable explanation and I wouldn't feel secure with a provider like that.

devops000• 9 months ago

You could use Cloud66 or Kamal to make it even easier

BilalBudhani• 9 months ago

I recently moved a couple of Rails projects to a VPS using Dokploy and couldn't be happier. Apart from the cost savings the bump in available resources is a big plus. It is astonishing how Heroku still gets away with 512 mb memory for $25/m

background: I have been self-hosting apps on VPS for a while now but just started using a tool

simianparrot• 9 months ago

Each new staging environment still required DNS and CDN configuration - not difficult, but not automatic either. The team also took on responsibility for server monitoring, security updates, and handling any infrastructure issues themselves - operational overhead that Heroku had previously covered. And while Hetzner's price-performance is exceptional, its limited presence in the US was a consideration; for this staging workload, it wasn't an issue, but it's a factor for production services targeting US users.

If you factor in salaries, I can see this ending up costing more than Heroku. $3000/m is one (underpaid) developer here in Scandinavia.

That's the equation that's often lacking, and why Heroku is still worth it where I work.

7222aafdcf68cfe• 9 months ago

We'll soon go full circle and people will discover sysadmin skills.

jbs789• 9 months ago

These discussions often devolve into how Heroku is “expensive”. You’re paying for convenience and not having to worry about something. Every business will evaluate this for themselves. For a profitable business with a lean team, Heroku works great.

greenie_beans• 9 months ago

recently migrated from heroku to digital ocean. saw immediate performance gains with my etl as soon as i made the migration. will never look back!

amai• 9 months ago

So how does disco compare to e.g. coolify, dokploy, dokku, kamal, uncloud or sliplane.io?

Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server

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