Fly.io Postgres cluster down for 3 days, no word from them about it

I really want to love Fly.io. It's super easy to get setup and use, but to be honest I don't think anyone should be building mission critical applications on their service. I ended up migrating everything over to AWS (which I reallllly didn't want to do) because:

* Frequent machines not working, random outages, builds not working

* Support wasn't responsive, didn't read my questions (kept asking same questions over and over again) -- I paid for a higher tier specifically for support.

* General lack of features (can't add sidecars, hard to integrate with external monitoring solutions)

* Lack of documentation -- For happy path its good but any edge cases the documentation is really lacking.

Anyway, for hobby projects its fine and nice. I still host a lot of personal projects there. But I have to move my companies infrastructure off of it because it ended up costing us too much time/frustration, etc. I really had high hopes going into it as I had read it was a spiritual successor of sorts to Heroku which was an amazing service in its day, but I don't think its there yet.

My experience was the same. I stopped using it for hobby projects recently when I had two consecutive days of being unable to build anything. The same stuff that built the week before, built fine locally, then eventually built on fly again — just, inexplicable downtime with no word from support.

Their free tier is very generous. You can get a lot happening and stay under their billing threshold. But, I like to get stuff done. I have a family. I code in my spare time very rarely, and I need a service that’ll let me just build my goddamn project. This was a small static site built by Node, so nothing spectacular happening.

I do wish them the best though. They have an excellent product in their tooling, and if they could stabilize their infrastructure I’d love to try them again.

Half the critical info for using their services is buried in some thread in the forum (posted by an employee). How bad is their documentation pipeline that they can't with similar effort get that same info in the documentation? Requests to put stuff in the docs go ignored.

The answer to _any_ usage related forum question should be:

1. It's in the documentation <here> (maybe I just added it)

2. If you're left with any confusion, let me know and I'll update the documentation to resolve it

Curious to know, have you tried Render? What is the successor to Heroku in your eyes?

I've had the same experience, unfortunately.

The Fly dashboard reported everything was A-ok, but requests would time out. I had to manually dig into the fly logs to see that their proxy couldn't reach the server, and there was nothing I could do to fix it.

This went on for hours, until I made an issue on their forums. They never replied or gave any indication they read the thread, but it somehow magically got fixed not long after.

I really want them to succeed, but this utter lack of communication and helpless feeling of not being able to do anything has cured me from fly.io for now.

Render has been my drop-in successor to Heroku. No complaints except their weird team pricing, which doesn't matter for solo projects

Scalingo is a good drop-in replacement for Heroku. They even use Heorku build packs. They've got good support and are an EU company with hosting in EU (if that's important to you).

> I need a service that’ll let me just build my goddamn project. This was a small static site built by Node, so nothing spectacular happening

(Cloudflare|GitHub|GitLab) Pages should do you nicely!

If you're deploying an Elixir/Phoenix app, then Gigalixir has worked really well for me. It's expensive, but then so is Heroku.

What’s their reliability been like?

Am I right in thinking the platform got bought a little while ago, and it’s being run by a relatively small outfit?

Render didn't support Docker images last I checked, and the worst part of Heroku and cloning it was not actually having a locally reproducible build image. I want to deploy what I've built locally, not hand my source over to some magical pipeline.

We recently added support for deploying images from container registries. Currently in early access.

I've been using them for the last ~10 months or so to run http://PhoenixOnRails.com. Gigalixir have been 100% reliable for me so far, but it's a low-traffic app - I can't tell you what it's like to run a big app on them at scale.

I don't know who owns them but I do get the impression it's a small team. Hasn't been an issue for me so far. Their customer service has been very helpful and responsive on the rare occasions I've needed to contact them

My experience has also been somewhat disappointing. I had a toy project that I decided to host elsewhere (Hetzner VM + Dokku), after the node for the PG database stopped working without any notification and didn't come back online (until I manually resurrected it).

Different strokes. Personally I avoid Docker in favor of source-code-deployment; the "magical pipeline" is usually just "git pull and then run a provided command". But Render does support Dockerfiles for eg. installing a runtime like Deno that isn't provided out of the box

I actually use digitalocean and it’s pretty solid for static sites (they’re free, I think). It’s also convenient because that’s where pretty much all of my stuff lives these days. I used to put piles of stuff on GitHub pages though! I have some great memories of learning how awesome static sites could be, and how cool it was that they’d deploy just by pushing your repository. That seemed like magic back then.

Free up until 3 static sites, that’s what it was (on the app platform)