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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

So as a coding n00b I tend to put my stuff on Heroku if only because at the moment that's what I know... and it is free. Any advantage to jumping into Google's App Engine?

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App Engine autoscales. To be sure, this isn't a key feature for a lot of sites which don't achieve a ton of scale, but Google can keep spinning up new frontend instances and the Data Store essentially "just scales" if you use it properly.

Heroku is no doubt the easiest to set up and use. I find their free tier too restrictive, however, since (1) apps are put to sleep pretty aggressively and take time to wake up, resulting in failed requests and (2) they have a set quota for total free hours/month across all apps on your account.

GCP free tier provides a lot more in comparison (app engine hours, cloud storage, memcache, pub/sub, cron, egress, cloud functions and more), but you have to be willing to tolerate the vendor lock-in.

Yeah I'm slowly becoming more annoyed by how quickly Heroku puts things to sleep.

take a look at gigalixir.com. I'm moving an app over there right now and they don't do the annoying sleep thing, or the daily restarts. You also get a free 10k row db. Pricing is reasonable if/when you want to scale later too. More expensive than rolling it on GCE yourself, but you get all the convenience of the heroku workflow.

I will check them out. Thank you.

Founder of Gigalixir here in case you have any questions. Also happy to give out free credits for the standard tier. Gigalixir also works with many languages other than Elixir.

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