Sobol
Building the Daemon
- Joined
- Oct 11, 2014
- Messages
- 25
- Likes
- 20
- Degree
- 0
What is this all about?
If you are technically savvy, you can get fast hosting for free. This won't be enough to handle a ton of visitors, but it absolutely smashes shared hosting. This is all made possible by Heroku, a platform-as-a-service (paas) provider owned by Salesforce.
How does this differ from a VPS?
Paas providers manage your hosting for you. That means you will never need to worry about security issues such as shellshock. You also have less control and not everything is compatible. For instance, you can only use supported versions of software and some CMS's won't work (like Craft CMS).
What's the catch?
Actually there are a few, but they have not been a problem for me.
Any mail has to be done through a 3rd party SMTP server. If you try to send email from Heroku, nothing will happen. You need to use an addon like Mailgun or SendGrid, which both have free options. (Note: This requires technical capability)
Heroku doesn't support FTP or SSH. You must deploy all of your websites with Git (A best practice no matter where you host, but is much more complicated than FTP)
Your databases are limited to 10,000 rows for free. (and 20 connections).
Free Heroku apps automatically go to sleep after they have not been used for an hour. This is bad. This means that users would have to wait 20 seconds before your page will load while Heroku starts your app. Fortunately there is a workaround. You can use Pingdom or http://kaffeine.herokuapp.com/ to automatically ping your app, preventing your app from sleeping. Pingdom requires some setup, but has monitoring features, while Kaffeine is free and only takes 5 seconds to setup.
Bonus Points: Use Cloudflare as a DNS + CDN + SSL for free and install the Memcachier addon in Heroku.
My speed test:
If you are technically savvy, you can get fast hosting for free. This won't be enough to handle a ton of visitors, but it absolutely smashes shared hosting. This is all made possible by Heroku, a platform-as-a-service (paas) provider owned by Salesforce.
How does this differ from a VPS?
Paas providers manage your hosting for you. That means you will never need to worry about security issues such as shellshock. You also have less control and not everything is compatible. For instance, you can only use supported versions of software and some CMS's won't work (like Craft CMS).
What's the catch?
Actually there are a few, but they have not been a problem for me.
Any mail has to be done through a 3rd party SMTP server. If you try to send email from Heroku, nothing will happen. You need to use an addon like Mailgun or SendGrid, which both have free options. (Note: This requires technical capability)
Heroku doesn't support FTP or SSH. You must deploy all of your websites with Git (A best practice no matter where you host, but is much more complicated than FTP)
Your databases are limited to 10,000 rows for free. (and 20 connections).
Free Heroku apps automatically go to sleep after they have not been used for an hour. This is bad. This means that users would have to wait 20 seconds before your page will load while Heroku starts your app. Fortunately there is a workaround. You can use Pingdom or http://kaffeine.herokuapp.com/ to automatically ping your app, preventing your app from sleeping. Pingdom requires some setup, but has monitoring features, while Kaffeine is free and only takes 5 seconds to setup.
Bonus Points: Use Cloudflare as a DNS + CDN + SSL for free and install the Memcachier addon in Heroku.
My speed test:
Last edited:
