Your own mini-Heroku for $5/month

While I love the idea of Dokku (and Flynn), I would warn those who have little to no dev-ops experience that this is not quite (yet) the silver bullet that it sometimes is marketed as.<p>I am a long-time non-web developer who has been doing a Rails side-project for the past year or so. I was using Heroku for free hosting, which was a breeze when I came across the first of these &quot;$5 Heroku&quot; posts (I have seen at least 5 or 6 prior to this one). Since then I&#x27;ve followed at least 5 different tutorials from start to finish trying to get Dokku up on DigitalOcean. So far, no successes.<p>Now, this is largely my fault (I&#x27;m a beginner in this realm), but I also think the technology is not as mature as a &quot;mini-Heroku&quot; would suggest. Part of the big ease of Heroku is, that you don&#x27;t have to create Heroku before you use it.

This is a mini-Heroku until you hit some database or routing issues. Then it is just another server you have to manage yourself.

Has anyone used Elastic Beanstalk?<p>It seems like that is always missing from these conversations. Maybe it has a bad price point or something? I&#x27;m going to look into it soon... Seems to me that standard EB + RDS + ElastiCache would make a lot more sense than these single server not-proven-scalable setups. I can&#x27;t run a real production Rails app with this Dokku setup it seems...<p>And then if I need Solr or something extra I could stick it on the EB instance or spin up a new EC2 for services. Heroku add-on services cost so much that I bet running a micro instance is cheaper than paying the monthly fee for the add-on, plus you could stick a few on 1 box since you&#x27;re limited only by bandwidth&#x2F;CPU.

Can somebody tell me the difference between using this and, say, a normal http-server+virtualenv+database set up?

If you&#x27;re looking for a private Heroku that&#x27;s multi-host, check out <a href="http://deis.io/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;deis.io&#x2F;</a>. We are about to announce our 0.3 release which features team support (e.g. deis sharing:add &lt;user&gt;)

I use this myself to host my website. I&#x27;ve forked it and added buildpacks for Jekyll and Octopress (one of the recent commits broke Octopress) for anyone who&#x27;s interested and although I haven&#x27;t cleaned it up enough to submit a pull request, it works perfectly. May take a look at sending one over the holidays<p>Octopress bare repo: <a href="https://github.com/rodeva/octopress-dokku-bare" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rodeva&#x2F;octopress-dokku-bare</a><p>Dokku fork for Jekyll and Octopress: <a href="https://github.com/rodeva/dokku" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rodeva&#x2F;dokku</a>

I used this (dokku on DigitalOcean as described) in production for several months for NodeJS - unfortunately some of the containers crashed every now and then and did NOT restart - a manual intervention was necessary. It does, however, work perfectly for PHP &amp; Ruby. And if you know a bit of nginx-config-magic, you can even use multiple domains on the system :)

If you have already used Chef, Puppet or something else to automate your deployment, you probably don&#x27;t need this.

CAAS (Container As A Service !!) <a href="http://blog.copper.io/stackdock-blazing-fast-docker-as-a-service-with-ssds-for-5/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.copper.io&#x2F;stackdock-blazing-fast-docker-as-a-ser...</a>

Digital Ocean comes with an option to build dokku on creation

Mini-Heroku for $5&#x2F;Month and many hours of update the system, find errors, analyse logs, ...<p>For a small test system ok &#x2F; or hobby project, but not for a productive usage.

not that I have tried, but I was always wondering how Cloud66 compares <a href="https://www.cloud66.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cloud66.com&#x2F;</a>

Bla