Thanks for the feedback! Tremendously helpful. I’ve had some good experience with Heroku on other platforms (Rails, Node), but I was curious how Elixir and Phoenix would perform, since that’s how I’m building my current side project.
kofno
keathley
We’ve been using Heroku to host our Elixir / Phoenix apps here at Carbon Five. Not being able to use observer and such is annoying but otherwise there haven’t been too many issues or gotchas. Overall its been a pretty good experience.
2
hilarycheng
kofno
I think I’d be more inclined to go with DigitalOcean if they had an RDS-ish offering of some sort.
2
rafadc
I’m doing a bit of necromancy here raising this thread from the dead but these days I rediscovered dokku. For my personal projects I’m going back to the 20$/month server and dokku instead of the small instance per application. Cheaper and faster. The resources are easily and more optimally distributed between different applications. In the long run I found it cheaper. 
3
thousandsofthem
- DO: $5 during development, $5+ during prod (you know, depends
). Even cheapest instance is really fast - Heroku: free plan exists (instance should sleep X hrs/day), good enough for some demos, don’t expect more. Latency quote high, deploy is really really simple (git push)
Related: how do you deploy elixir/phoenix apps? Quote painful point (especially after capistrano experience)
1
rafadc
I am using Dokku since I found it is as easy as heroku but with the ability to add background workers in non elixir apps.
Now that I think of it. With a single dyno in heroku you can have background workers in elixir?
2
jwarlander
Using ExRM releases, I’ve found it’s really not a big deal; deploy a .tar.gz file, stop your app, unpack it, start your app. While I know hot upgrades are possible as well, I haven’t worried about it yet - so far it’s not been worth the effort for my use cases.
A huge advantage is that I don’t need any dependencies installed on the server - everything is in the release package. I have to generate the release on a similar type of machine as the intended server, of course, but that’s no issue as my laptop, desktop and the servers are all running Linux anyway. If it weren’t like that, I’d probably have Jenkins do the release packaging on a build server - probably will do that soon anyway, for convenience.
The guide for using ExRM with Phoenix is pretty nice:
http://www.phoenixframework.org/docs/advanced-deployment
One little nagging detail that can be tricky to get into your workflow w/ releases is Ecto migrations; mix doesn’t exist in the deployed release. There are good ways to handle that yourself though, by using the exposed functionality within Ecto:
Of course, you can always run the migrations from our dev machine, but that might be trickier to integrate into an automated release flow if you’re trying for that.
5
karmajunkie
i’m running an elixir app on heroku, AMA… (not really, i’m not an elixir expert yet, but I do have it up and running…)
2
swennemans
Anyone has experience with VPSDime? The benchmark results look nice, and you get 6gb with 4 (virtual cores) for 7 dollar.
Currently I have one production projected hosted on Heroku, mostly because I don’t want to be bothered with database settings, backups etc. However, given that it’s fairly easy to deploy Elixir apps with exrm/distillery, and Heroku is pricey (25$ for a simple dyno + 50$ for database) I think that you get better ‘bang for bucks’ with:
-
Managed PostgreSQL from compose.io with Amazon EC2. Unfortunately they’re not offering PostgreSQL hosting in DO datacentres (as they do with MongoDB), to seriously cut costs
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Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL + an EC2 instance.
The big caveat here is of course that it’s hard to say anything meaningful about the performance of each of the database offerings compared to the monthly price.
0