* Digital Ocean Apps -- somewhat finicky but works very similar to Heroku, it gets closer to bare metal so I prefer it
* render.com
* AWS Elastic Beanstalk -- though setting this up is non-trivial, it is very similar to Heroku with its "set it and forget it"
* AWS Container Services -- if you're using Docker
* Google App Engine
* Supabase -- geared for SPAs but this may be the ticket depending on what you're building, is open source
1. Their server manager process got in an unresponsive state. It wouldn't update my service. It stopped reporting logs from the service that was running. I went to the AWS Loft and consulted with the AWS Support technician. They had me log into the machine with SSH and troubleshoot. I was using Elastic Beanstalk specifically so I would not have to log into machines.
2. The console frequently showed servers as running when they weren't. And vice-versa. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out why my server didn't start when it actually did start and why my server isn't listening on its port when the console incorrectly showed that it started. Logs were also delayed randomly.
3. The final straw happened on a Saturday. Elastic Beanstalk suddenly started returning errors. I purchased an AWS Support subscription and filed a ticket. It turns out Elastic Beanstalk Team had deployed on a Saturday and then rolled back. Unfortunately, anyone who did API calls through the new API version got new values added to their Elastic Beanstalk API backing database. The rolled-back the server errored when it saw the new values. They refused to just fix the bad data in their database caused by their bad deployment. Instead, they asked me (their customer) to download special management tools and perform manual operations to fix it. And I had to pay them to find out these instructions.
Now I use Heroku.
Would be curious how it compares to some of these.
Looks interesting
> Create a backend
But you'd probably host your SPA elsewhere, eg Vercel, Netlify, GitHub pages
BUT: In the last year I've had some rather serious downtime issues that were 100% Heroku's fault. (Poor encapsulation of Postgres configuration via the connection string, and they mistakenly claimed that I violated their TOS when I didn't. They apologized and fixed the situation.)
I'd really like to see some good alternatives to Heroku. Not just because of their screwups, but because the languages that I want to work on have limited support in Heroku.
Other competitors like render.com are starting to look like they'll be competitive on features and are way cheaper too.
They use self-signed certificates on Heroku Postgres servers without a certificate authority present in the chain. No chance to establish reliable peer verification. A shame, I would love to use Heroku more often without compromising security.
I see this all the time. Entrepreneurs trying to solve the people problem by avoidance. The problem with the super efficient player is twofold. First, it's not really scaleable. Second, what if the person gets sick or is in vacation?
That said, I would also recommend Heroku to many.
The context here is also that of a single entrepreneur building a business. At that point in the lifecycle of a product downtime really isn't that big of a deal, customers tend to be pretty understanding so long as you recover.
Yes, you'll pay more for a Heroku Postgres instance than you would for a VPS on Digital Ocean with Postgres running on it, likewise you'll pay more for Heroku Dynos than another VPS to run your application server. On the other side though, your backup, rollback, deploy, and scaling strategies can all be "Heroku does that", and you can focus on the much more valuable job of building a business.