Some thoughts about some of the best cloud hosting providers in 2018 and Hatchbox a Ruby on Rails deployment service you must try if you are a Ruby on Rails developer.

Heroku

Heroku is one of the best, reliable, scalable and well known cloud hosting service on the web.

His purpose is to make developers and users life easier. You don’t have to worry about the security of the server, they manage to resolve all security issues. In other words you don’t need a DevOps to manage your server.

PROS:

✅ System maintenance: they update the distribution operating system e.g. Linux and all the related applications for running the system with the latest updates.

✅ Scale: Heroku scales in an instant, both vertically and horizontally. You can elegantly run everything from tiny hobby projects to enterprise-grade e-commerce handling Black Friday surges.

✅ Add-ons: It has lots of add-ons, some of them are free others with payment. E.g. databases, transactional emails, server and app metrics (memory, CPU load and errors)

✅ Price: this service starts from free plan (on the free plan the server go to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity and has 512mb RAM, but the speed is pretty good if you are using this on a side project or custom app that is used only by you.)

Heroku is strongly documented for multiple programming languages, it supports Javascript, Ruby, Java, PHP, Python, Scala and more.

Easy for you to make changes and version control, it supports GitHub integration and continuous delivery (it means that you make the change, you commit the change, than you push it to Heroku and it’s live).

CONS

❌ It becomes very expensive on larger applications with more users.

The second plan with a monthly pay of 7$/mo will never sleeps but if you want a database larger than 10k rows then you will need to upgrade your database plan to $9/mo. The professional plan cost is starting at 25$ per month and can scale to thousands of dollars when your user base grows.

👉 If you are interested in learning more about Heroku costs you can read my other article here: Why I choose Hatchbox.io over Heroku? And why you should use it too if you are a Ruby on Rails Developer.

I’m sure you heard of Unsplash, the best place for photographers to showcase their work. They spend $18K / monthly for server costs using Heroku and other services. You can read more about their hosting costs here: What does Unsplash Cost?

Their plan and approach is to pay more as your business grows.

❌ If you want to store images or data you have to use Amazon S3, Google or any other data cloud service.

❌ You don’t have access to the root of the server, but they the a custom build CLI with commands to control the server.