
Heroku Postgres PGX: Bigger Databases, Improved Infrastructure, Same Price - rawrmaan
https://blog.heroku.com/heroku-pgx-plans
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kareemm
We switched off Heroku to AWS Aurora once Aurora came out with a production-
ready Postgres offering.

We haven’t looked back. On Heroku we used to run up against their CPU
burstability limits and would get throttled. Simple Queries for an indexed
field would take 100ms+. Web requests would queue up and customers would have
a terrible experience.

The worst part is that Heroku support would often take days or weeks (!) to
respond. And we were paying them $500+ per month. When they did, they gave us
no insight into when we hit the burstability limits or when we’d be back to
normal - the app simply got slow and it was never clear why.

Switching to aurora was fairly painless. And we pay less for a box that’s got
roughly 4x the resources, decent management tools, and no burstability limits.
It’s been fantastic.

We sent detailed and kind feedback to Heroku before and after switching and
got a fairly bland response. Perhaps they couldn’t let us know that these
kinds of new Postgres plans were coming, but it came off like Heroku didn’t
really care much about the experience we had on their platform.

~~~
akurilin
Have you experienced any pain-points with Aurora that perhaps you would have
avoided by using RDS? We've been thinking of switching over, but some teams
reported seeing different performance behavior from their existing queries
that in some cases made them roll back.

~~~
kareemm
Haven’t seen anything negative so far. It’s been a couple months now and super
snappy. But perf with Heroku was so unpredictable that Aurora would have to be
terrible for us to consider going back.

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ukulele
I used to love, love, love Heroku. I would tell everyone about it, and at one
point I was probably running 20+ projects on it.

I can't quite put my finger on why, but I've gradually transitioned everything
off it over the past few years. I think it's been a combination of the ease of
AWS, along with Heroku's changes to their Dyno pricing, but I never actually
sat down and did the math. It just started to feel a little less controllable
and a little more than I wanted to pay. To be fair, their database tiers were
pretty pricey, so this article is nice news.

I'd be curious to hear if others have had a similar experience?

~~~
dtech
Their database prices are actually similar to AWS RDS Postgres now, and
weren't that much higher before, especially with the nice features & interface
you get in return.

Their dynos are insanely expensive though. A dedicated instance (VPS) with
2.5GB of RAM will set you back $250/month, while a similar EC2 instance will
cost <$75/month.

It's hard to justify that the Heroku platform makes up for that
$175/month/server difference compared to what AWS & co have nowadays.

~~~
kuschku
> A dedicated instance (VPS) with 2.5GB of RAM will set you back $250/month,
> while a similar EC2 instance will cost <$75/month.

To get actually more data on this, I’ll show a direct comparison – that same
instance (Heroku Dyno Performance M) would cost you at

    
    
        Heroku $250/month
        GCP $24.27/month
        AWS LightSail $20/month
        DO $10/month
        VULTR $10/month
        Linode $10/month
        OVH $3.80/month
        Hetzner $3.67/month
        Scaleway $3.26/month
    

(Disclaimer: some of the services may differ in price due to different
exchange rates and different taxation)

~~~
phonon
Just to add another data point--

AWS Fargate 1 VCPU, 3 GB RAM

    
    
      1 CPU = 1*0.00001406*3600*24*30 = $36.44
      3 RAM = =3*0.00000353*3600*24*30 = $27.45
    

Total = $63.89 + bandwidth (I believe dynos come with a generous bandwidth
allocation included)

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ApolloRising
They screwed up when the messed with the free tier.

