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Comment by ezekg | Hacker News Reader

It's not that setting up a server is hard. The reason Heroku exists is because they are your devops team -as-a-service.

I would correct the last part. Appliku is an automated devops as a service. Heroku is selling you a very much overpriced complete service. And that's where Appliku comes in as a way to fight insane costs.

But yes, setting up a server is not super hard. Doing it often and with convenience that's where improvement is needed compared to doing it manually.

I think your project is cool, but deploying an application to a server on `git push` is not devops. Heroku is selling managed servers and databases with easy deployment, you're selling easy deployment to unmanaged servers and databases.

If I understand you correctly, you say that setting up a server isn't hard, but then you seem to imply that it's hard enough that you might want to employ a team of people to do it, which seems pretty hard to me.

So I'm not sure that I follow you.

Setting up a server and database is not hard. Maintaining and scaling it is. I don't want to use my valuable time on these things, so Heroku is worth the cost. People who say Heroku is expensive are not in their target market -- businesses who want to avoid their team unnecessarily spending time on infrastructure instead of product.

Heroku is much, much cheaper than 1) me spending my time on these things, or 2) hiring a capable engineer to do it for me. It's build vs buy. I'd rather buy.

But that's not to say I'm not interested in a Heroku alternative. But it needs to be a *real* alternative. :)

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