You can just spin up a raw VPS on EC2 or Lightsail, give it a public IP, and call it a day. You aren't required to implement every enterprise pattern in the book.

If there is any single service I'd avoid on AWS it's Lightsail, it'll cost you a lot more than almost anything out there, is slow as molasses (even tiny services can need tens of minutes to deploy) and you'll experience random failures not even AWS reps can explain to you. Avoid at all costs.

It's a ghost of its former self, but I'd probably still rather use Heroku today than being forced to use Lightsail even once again.

>Lightsail, it'll cost you a lot more than almost anything out there,

Lightsail is pretty competitive (price wise) with other providers. Been running s B2B app on it for a few years now - nothing much, just your basic crud app running on lightsail instance + lightsail db. Nice to have a "monthly" rate on each instead of the EC2 opaque (and "surprise!") pricing.

I have only use lightsail for one project with two VPSs, but it just works like a VPS (two, because we have another for staging). Price is competitive.

Its not my favourite, but its not terrible.

Same experience here, hosting some small projects on LightSail. It was pretty smooth to set up and get running, and no real complaints so far.

Congrats, your raw EC2-hosted 500MB WebGL experimental card game went to the HN Front Page! You now owe AWS $30k in egress costs.

Well this is the dream right ?

You build something, well enough that it can handle the traffic, and people come, and it does.

Welcome to the gaming industry

No, it is not the dream. The same thing on Hetzner or Linode would cost $30 instead of $30k.

> Well this is the dream right ?

Yes it is, we call these dreams a nightmare

Egress costs have substantially reduced (thankfully)

> You can just spin up a raw VPS on EC2 or Lightsail, give it a public IP, and call it a day

You could do this, but for the life of me I can't imagine why you do this over using a platform like DO, vultr, hetzner or any one of a hundred similar services that will give you a better developer experience for this kind of workflow, often at a fraction of the price

I never said it would be cheaper. I did say it wasn't complicated.

But that's costly. Speaking of my own experience: going from a webapp fully hosted on an EC2 instance to a railway and vercel setup reduced my costs 10x.

t4g.nano is $3/m; a similar spec-ed fargate on ecs (just any docker container) is $10/m

This sentence beautifully encapsulates my point. I know that this is just ordinary jargon, but wow that's a lot all at once. And it does seem like something I need to know before I start.

sure but on the flip side - when I signed up for vercel I had literally no idea what was going on. It just said "do you want to start a blog? here are 1000 templaptes"

Maybe so, but it's still not the complexity nightmare that some would have us believe it is.

“EC2 or Lightsail”. And this right here is why I use GCP. Google got VMs right.

GCP has similar offerings to Lightsail, Fargate, EC2, Lambda, or other compute substrates. Nobody is forcing you to use more than “basic” offerings. AWS core services are often architected that way!

What amazes me is how Heroku absolutely nailed what most web apps need nearly 20 years ago.

I miss heroku dearly. somewhere at Salesforce there is an exec who killed the product and shifted it to enterprise and is now looking at the vibe coding revolution seeing their opportunity missed.

I suspect the people responsible have fully justified to themselves any decisions they made, helped along with any bonuses they got for doing it.

Render has been excellent replacement, in my experience.

Last time I tried render, it did not allow me to spin up 1 instance of my web app, so I'm never going back. (To clarify: Render would always spin up a minimum of 2 instances.)

Digital ocean is the answer. You give it a container and off you go.

Not sure how Digital Ocean is comparable to what Heroku used to be.

Of all the things to be upset about, mandatory 2FA doesn't seem like one.

2FA has been in place for years through email but this new requirement forces a phone.

Good. E-mail based 2FA is bad, and they appear to support TOTP too as an option, as they should. Wish they supported U2F though.

Why is email based 2fa bad but phone good? There are classes of issues you get through phone 2fa compared to email

Typically, you can also reset password via email, so it's really only one factor. Compromised email = compromised server.

It’s negligent to not use 2FA for any cloud platform where credentials can be used to spin up resources.

I should have been more clear 2FA has been in place for years the phone requirement is new.

They use TOTP for 2FA (industry standard), which doesn't require a phone.

Their help page lists a bunch of 2FA app options, all of which run on phones, so it's understandable to think a phone is required. (I'm disappointed they don't list the app I use, which is Aegis Authenticator.)

But actually you can use any TOTP app, and they don't all need a phone. For example, macOS (desktop) has built-in TOTP 2FA as part of the password manager.

Good! Should have been done long ago

I've been enjoying railway!

More likely than not they’re probably long gone, or have completely forgotten. The idea that someone out there regrets that decision is laughable. The fact that it’s laughable is sad.

Fly and Render are what heroku would be if they didn’t stop innovating. And neon db for Postgres.

> And neon db for Postgres.

For 90% of the time when they're up.

Fly is unreliable. Render does not allow you to spin up 1 instance of an app.

That won't last. https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/

Uhoh. I don't know what that means, but I unfortunately detect double-speak.

No longer developing new features or offering new contracts, but eVerYtHinG iS FiNe.

it's only a nightmare if you had not to deal with Azure

I switched to Cloudflare and it's been a breath of fresh air - everything I need and the pricing is reasonable.

AWS is aimed at enterprise, not personal projects. Personal projects wouldn’t give them any meaningful revenue because the only thing that matters is cost.