Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server

What’s the best alternative to heroku today for someone that doesn’t want to do any sysadmin and just dump a Django site and database somewhere?

Any place you can get a vps from.

Any VPS you fancy that fits the price/performance/location/support you want, then point Coolify/Dokploy/whatever at it.

I did just this using Coolify, Mythic Beasts running Django & Postgres the other month from Google App Engine. Hilariously easy, even with my extremely rusty skills.

It is worth learning to use Docker Swarm. Deployments are as simple as pushing a new container to your registry and running one command. I built a free CLI tool rove.dev that simplifies provisioning and does service diffing.

Either that or use a PaaS that deploys to VMs. Can't make recommendations here but you could start by looking at Semaphore, Dokku, Dokploy.

PythonAnywhere: https://www.pythonanywhere.com/

Oracle has free VPS if your requirements aren't huge. Hobby project etc.

Whats wrong with just spinning up a server on hetzner. At most you need to setup nginx and a systemctl service

https://render.com/ is probably the closest, I'm really enjoying using them. Workflow is the same as heroku, but cheaper, no nightly restarts, supports new python versions etc..

I'm looking for simple k8s alternatives like docker swarm and kamal. Rove looks really interesting.

I think the bar has been lowered since ChatGPT started instructing people to do things. This question about Python wouldn't even have come up 10 years ago.

I use Render, spend remarkably little time doing devops. Its fantastic

Definitely check out swarm. I've heard so many great things from engineers that use it on large projects, and it takes very little time to learn if you already know the docker cli.

Won’t there be ongoing OS updates, database updates etc? If there’s a new security hole do I have to run to a computer and run a patch, etc?

I just want someone else handling all that.