I was introduced to Heroku at a hackathon, a few months before graduating college, when it was still in its prime. I was instantly hooked, and from there I went on to use it for every single solo project I’ve ever put on the internet (including a website for a small business that’s been working reliably for ~6 years now). I loathe everything about working with Docker, Kube, AWS, etc. Heroku was designed for people like me.

I still haven’t taken the time to research an alternative for future projects. I’ve had a sense the time has been coming, but I’ve been putting it off because it’s going to be a pain, and because it’s probably going to make me a little sad no matter what I land on.

Salesforce can go fly a kite.

PS: I just remembered I have a pretty good story about Heroku and that small business site I mentioned.

Originally I had the source for that site on Bitbucket. One day, I went in to make some changes and found that Bitbucket would no longer let me sign in without first converting my account to an Atlassian account. Sigh. Fine, whatever.

Well- the account migration got botched, and the end result was that I was locked out. I went through support, they couldn’t figure it out, etc. Just totally lost access to all those repositories. And I had a newish computer that didn’t have them locally stored yet. Luckily this was the only important one on there, but… it was quite important.

Then I remembered that Heroku has you push to a git remote.

I was able to recover the entire source code for the site from my Heroku app by cloning the git repo that it offered up as the deploy target.

Heroku saved me (and needless to say, I’ll never be using Bitbucket again).