02 June 2015

Good bye Heroku !

I primarily work on Ruby on Rails and I use to deploy one of my pet projects to Production entirely on the Heroku's free tier. It was a wonderful two years to see having my application running there during which time I had around a thumping 10 Million page views! Heroku's free tier is one of the most used around the world for quickly showcasing development applications. However, my Production application was such that all my needs felt well under Heroku's free tier.

Here are some of the freebies I use to enjoy
  • Free Dedicated (techincally not) machine with 512 MB - The reason its technically not because you are allotted a free worker that would go to sleep if the application is not up for 30 minutes. However you could easily overcome this with something like Pingdom.
  • Free Postgres Database - Although there was no specific size limit to this other than a maximum number of 5000 rows, I would still say this is one of the best things Heroku offers. Not only your application can talk to it, anything anywhere from the world can talk to the database directly. And that too 100% free!
  • Free emails via Sendgrid - A maximum 200 emails per day! Sendgrid's free Addon allows me send upto 200 emails per day. My application's requirement was in the range 20-40.
  • Unlimited Job Schedulers - Although they would take one entire and the only worker allotted to you to spin, this is a boon considering you do not have a full fledged linux machine with you. I use to have only one rake task that takes a routine back up of my data as CSV and email it to me.
  • Free PG Backup - Again, if you want to routinely backup your data, you don't have to write any complex code. Heroku provides this out of the box and for free!

Now that Heroku is pulling down the curtain on the 24 hour availability or to pay $7 a month, I have no other option to switch to a much better alternative - that is Digital Ocean. Sign up here for a free $10 credit - https://m.do.co/c/21693a3f9c9e

Sad to depart ways, but you made me learn a lot of stuff in these two + years.

Cheers!
Braga