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Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

Isn't Digital Ocean just a VPS provider? I'd encourage you to give Heroku a try (it's free to play with). It's pretty cool that with really minimal planning on your part you can "git push heroku" and have a working app.

I don't know if this is an "aha" moment for you -- it might depend on how much you enjoy provisioning servers yourself -- but when it works it's pretty cool.

I suspect there are people who are running apps "themselves" on heroku that would otherwise require them to pay a server administrator.

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That's fine for simple one-off apps that don't require serious infrastructure, but Heroku is just ridiculous with its pricing if you need any kind of complexity.

I can burn through 1GB of Redis cache really easily; on Heroku, that's $200 a month. On AWS a cache.t2.small instance is $16 a month. The same for SQL space, disk storage, etc., once you're past a certain point Heroku becomes just unbelievably expensive.

https://github.com/progrium/dokku

That gets you git push deployment, and runs just fine on DO. You're still responsible for hardening your VPSs, but DO has some fairly good guides for that too.

That's the disconnect for me. There have to be prebuilt Amazon AMIs with push to deploy functionality for various stack flavors. I guess the simplicity and allure of Heroku's git integration makes it easy for developers to forego research on those. It still seems one hell of a price to pay especially when coupled with vendor lock-in (Disclaimer: I don't know if Heroku PaaS locks you in as much as say, GAE)

Disclaimer: I don't know if Heroku PaaS locks you in as much as say, GAE

In my (limited) experience: not by a long shot. Heroku setups may seem locked in, but GAE is obscene. No outgoing HTTP requests, no normal DB, basically everything is GAE specific. Heroku is not the most generic thing out there, but, by God, it's still miles better than GAE.

The key is that Heroku is trying to support all major web app frameworks, whereas GAE only supports the GAE framework.

The tradeoff is super interesting: using their framework allows them to hella optimize the instance for you, but you're pretty darn stuck with it :/

No outgoing HTTP requests? GAE has URL Fetch API from first day.

Also, GAE can now run docker and also connect to MySQL running on Google Cloud infrastructure, which is a separate offering.

Sorry for not being explicit. My point was: you need to use a special API to do outgoing HTTP requests. This leads to vendor lock-in. In Heroku, you just do it.

No you don't. You still use your language's standard library. But GAE uses their own version behind the scenes. You code still uses urllib if on Python and net/http if using Go.

So in GAE too, you just do it.

I could re-deploy a heroku app on my typical stack (ruby, rails, postgres) to digital ocean or similar in a couple of hours.

Most of that would just be setting up the new one and migrating the data across.

You don't have to significantly alter apps (in that stack) to be heroku-compatible.

You can have the best of both worlds with Cloud66. (git-based deployment, but you pay a small fee - $19 first server, $9 additional) and it targets cloud provider of your choice, with instance sizes you choose. (no I'm not a Cloud66 employee, but happy with their service)

Cloud66 was hacked in May 2013[1][2] and shortly afterwards, they scrubbed all references to the attack from their site. Pathetic.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5669315

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5685406

They're not the first to get hacked, but covering it up is definitely concerning.

Correct, AWS, Azure, etc would be considered IaaS providers not Digital Ocean.

IMHO Digital Ocean counts as IaaS as well. You get VMs (=infrastructure ) and can manage them via an API (=as a service).

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