Yeah, I don't consider Heroku or the platform-as-a-service providers good for hobby projects, esp. something like a forum or blog where you can just get a cheap VPS somewhere.
The sweet spot is having very reasonable billing like $15/month for a 20GB database (5MB free) and $35/month for a 2 dedicated workers (or free for 1 which needs to be spun up and is ~10 seconds for the first request). My current use case is projects which could become small income earners, where ~50/month to experiment is dirt cheap if it saves me hours of setup time.
you know, I hadn't evaluated it since it was a pure ruby service. It's a bit different with a jvm language where you can get away with 1 worker (threaded request handling) and the db upgrade. $15/month would likely be sufficient for a forum. I'll give it a try and see how it goes :)
I wish there were something between the $15 and $200 db offerings.
Yep, it's definitely a steep jump from 20GB shared to dedicated. At that point it might be better to move onto your own hardware (if I fill up 20GB database then I'm doing something right).
The sweet spot is having very reasonable billing like $15/month for a 20GB database (5MB free) and $35/month for a 2 dedicated workers (or free for 1 which needs to be spun up and is ~10 seconds for the first request). My current use case is projects which could become small income earners, where ~50/month to experiment is dirt cheap if it saves me hours of setup time.