Last time a post about Heroku was posted, I talked about my great experience using Coolify:
I am using Coolify (https://coolify.io), an open source self-hosted PaaS which is a relatively newer kid on the block compared to Dokku and CapRover. I tried both of these and I just didn't like how they were, always had some problem or another.
In contrast, Coolify has a great GUI that abstracts away the most common things about PaaS hosting, like connecting to GitHub automatically for git push deploys, SSL certificates, reverse proxying and custom domain support, and best of all, having support for Heroku style buildpacks as well as Dockerfiles. I've been quite happy with it, the creator has a Discord and responds to issues very quickly.
With regards to non-self-hosted options, I did try out Render, Fly.io and Railway but I found that their free servers were too anemic. I was compiling a Rust backend and it simply could not compile on their free servers. On Hetzner, for 5 bucks I could get a 2 AMD vCPU and 2 GB RAM machine that was sufficient to compile my Rust apps in a way that the non-self-hosted ones were not. I have a JS frontend app that works fine though but I wanted to keep everything under the same VPS, plus I can run other types of self-hosted services on it too, like Plausible analytics and a Ghost blog. I'm not sure if those are allowed on non-self-hosted options.
All in all, it costs me 5 bucks a month, and I never have to worry about sudden upcharges for traffic à la AWS as in the very worst, my VPS goes down for a while. I'm now running about 20 different services on this 5 dollar box including databases and applications as well as other services, works just fine.
Hesitate to tell that Fly is the only good option since they won't hibernate your instances, and have a reasonable free db and bandwidth quota .. unlike Render (almost not count as free plan, more like some free trial)
I'm fearing folks could abuse Fly and they could start to let it go..
Why Fly over DigitalOcean or similar? Is it just that it's all done for you?
Fly takes your credit card info up front so if you abuse it they can just charge you. Also people who give their credit card upfront are less likely to abuse their plans.
Comments
Last time a post about Heroku was posted, I talked about my great experience using Coolify:
I am using Coolify (https://coolify.io), an open source self-hosted PaaS which is a relatively newer kid on the block compared to Dokku and CapRover. I tried both of these and I just didn't like how they were, always had some problem or another.
In contrast, Coolify has a great GUI that abstracts away the most common things about PaaS hosting, like connecting to GitHub automatically for git push deploys, SSL certificates, reverse proxying and custom domain support, and best of all, having support for Heroku style buildpacks as well as Dockerfiles. I've been quite happy with it, the creator has a Discord and responds to issues very quickly.
With regards to non-self-hosted options, I did try out Render, Fly.io and Railway but I found that their free servers were too anemic. I was compiling a Rust backend and it simply could not compile on their free servers. On Hetzner, for 5 bucks I could get a 2 AMD vCPU and 2 GB RAM machine that was sufficient to compile my Rust apps in a way that the non-self-hosted ones were not. I have a JS frontend app that works fine though but I wanted to keep everything under the same VPS, plus I can run other types of self-hosted services on it too, like Plausible analytics and a Ghost blog. I'm not sure if those are allowed on non-self-hosted options.
All in all, it costs me 5 bucks a month, and I never have to worry about sudden upcharges for traffic à la AWS as in the very worst, my VPS goes down for a while. I'm now running about 20 different services on this 5 dollar box including databases and applications as well as other services, works just fine.
Hesitate to tell that Fly is the only good option since they won't hibernate your instances, and have a reasonable free db and bandwidth quota .. unlike Render (almost not count as free plan, more like some free trial)
I'm fearing folks could abuse Fly and they could start to let it go..
Why Fly over DigitalOcean or similar? Is it just that it's all done for you?
Fly takes your credit card info up front so if you abuse it they can just charge you. Also people who give their credit card upfront are less likely to abuse their plans.
Do tools like Coolify or Dokku take care of host level security?
No, you must secure your server yourself much as you would for any other cloud server that's not a PaaS.
What did coolify have that caprover didn’t?
Better UI, more streamlined GitHub integration (I could not for the life of me get CapRover's integration to work), Docker compose support