With a standard dyno, you get something like 1/15th of a core on the underlying EC2 instance. IMO, they're best for workers where latency isn't an issue.
For user-facing work, I use performance dynos.
Heroku _is_ expensive, but in exchange, you don't have to worry much at all about the ops side of things.
YMMV, it may not be suitable if you need to be profitable each month and can't afford to spend the baseline cost of, say, $1,000/month.
Thanks. I agree that heroku is an amazing service, a really impressive product.
But once you are using a single performance dyno, you are unlikely looking at a bill that's only "couple hundred dollars a month".
Thanks for confirming you use performance dynos for user-facing stuff -- I thought I was going insane discovering that it didn't look like standard dynos were suitable for that for me -- is "everyone else" using them though? The heroku docs imply they are indeed... standard (that's the name), and the performance dynos are for unusual performance needs.
Which is not what it was looking like to me.
Based on my current investigations, I agree being prepared to spend $1000/month is a better back of the napkin to-start-with estimate.
Which, sure, is quite possibly still a value compared to the number of hours you'd be spending setting up and maintaning something else. Quite possibly! But it's not "a couple hundred dollars a month".
For user-facing work, I use performance dynos.
Heroku _is_ expensive, but in exchange, you don't have to worry much at all about the ops side of things.
YMMV, it may not be suitable if you need to be profitable each month and can't afford to spend the baseline cost of, say, $1,000/month.