[dougbarrett]

AWS beanstalk allows you to run on very cheap instances, even cheaper if you get a plan and commit to a term.

It’s not a 1:1 experience, but I’ve enjoyed it as an alternative to Heroku for sure. Alternatively, you could spin up a server and install dokku which is pretty close to a shipping experience, but still requires some maintenance and hand holding.

[ryantgtg]

I switched from heroku to dokku (and DigitalOcean) last month. Overall: easy to adapt from heroku since so many of the concepts (and commands) are the same.

I tried to get too fancy and set two web services on the same app (since the DO droplet was giving me more CPU and 4x the RAM for half the price) but they seemed to battle each other for control of the database and/or were exceeding resources. So I chilled out and used 1 web service and set CPU and RAM resource limits. And... it's been smooth since then! Much faster than heroku, too.

Price-wise: we were on the $50/mo dyno plus $9/mo postgresql, and with DO we beefed up the managed database specs, and now get 4x the RAM on the droplet, and the total cost is the same as heroku.

We do still have a free tier staging server on heroku that we only use a couple times a year.

Oh shoot, I just remembered that I use staticman for processing comments on a couple jekyll blogs, and those use free heroku tiers. Argh!