And if we look at some European cloud providers' prices, it becomes painfully obvious that any such services (even incl. Render) built on top of major US cloud providers are excruciatingly overpriced - the markups can be as large as 5x for equivalent compute:
https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
This combined with something like Doku gives one a sense of what could be possible.
Please stop suggesting Hetzner for every random problem in existence.
I've been a happy Hetzner customer for years, BUT
1) They are cheap because they are comparable to a discount supermarket chain
2) They are not a cloud platform
2.1) They offer none of the advanced features available on modern cloud platforms
2.2) It would be almost impossible to build a PaaS like Heroku on Hetzner infrastructure
3) The latency to anywhere outside Europe is pretty bad (regarding EU data centers) and their network is not the best (regarding the whole network)
4) The cheap dedicated server offerings are consumer hardware (and possibly thus are the hosts for the cloud services), and the more expensive server hardware offerings are not necessarily cheaper than other options
5) They have consistent issues with their virtual/cloud offerings that are not remediable due to the aforementioned lack of advanced PaaS functionality
There is much more going on behind the scenes of a platform like Heroku than a single dokku instance on a budget host. You are comparing single apples to a global distribution chain of bananas.
I use hetzner personally (the OP article is hosted there) and I can't agree more. It's incomparable. You can get the first 90% of Heroku sure, but not any of the other 90% of reliability.
Besides reliability, the moment you need to scale up, you wish you were on Heroku or a real PaaS. Although their pricing model is unacceptable and there’s many better options by now.
We too use some Hetzner servers at work for infrequently accessed databases that have no need to be highly available. We recently migrated non-production logging to a Hetzner dedicated with 8TB of HDD. Almost unbeatable price.
Choose the right tool for the job. I have nothing against Hetzner, but I’ve been seeing them mentioned dozens of times in unsuitable contexts by now.
To put that in context, I've been a (mostly happy) architect on all three major clouds for several years. The thing that "triggered" me to explore alternative options is GCP's continuing pricing increases across the board, and it's extremely bad pricing model for indie projects (that used to NOT be the case).
One thing to realize though is all of this is VERY relative - reliability etc. CAN be achieved by using proper primitives (Kubernetes etc.), but that comes at the cost of additional setup. That does however has its upsides too, meaning that these days pretty much everything under the sun can be done via K8s on bare metal, and migrated later somewhere else with relative ease.
I haven't found GCP to be particularly expensive (besides for some subservices) - for indie projects, Firebase is top notch and, depending on your use case free or almost free -
I've always held the opinion that the markup on GCP, AWS, etc, is more than remediated by the savings in manpower requirement and cost of maintaining your own infrastructure.
Don't get me wrong, I love playing with self-hosted k8s for non-production, but when it comes to production, there's no real room for mistakes, downtime, constant maintenance and whatsoever.
If I had the time, or we had a dedicated SRE, sure - that might be a good path forward - but only if there is the chance of outgrowing the cost/profit ratio at some point. Unfortunately, what we provide at work is not a public offering, yet at the same time its being used by institutional money and has to have phenomenal availability and stability - I'd be hard pressed to sign off on a move to anything else in that case..
Yep, I like serverless offerings too (although some services, like Firestore, still leave much to be desired).
The problem is, big enterprise is "all in" on K8s and that becomes hard to reason about because when I tell them "use all of the optimizations available via GKE" they bark that that "ties them to GCP". But then when I wear another hat (as I did above) and suggest the opposite, folks in the other camp say we shouldn't rely on self- or semi-self-managed options. It seems there's no "win" here :-)
Also, to put in context what I meant above re recent price increases on GCP:
1) Per-cluster fee when it used to be free. This hurts hobbyist projects in particular (and yes, I know about the free tier for one zonal cluster, but that's not enough for playing around with one prod and one dev cluster env...).
2) Regional VM to multi-regional bucket traffic when it used to be free. This one is a huge degradation - used to be one of the selling points for Google's "Global Network", and there appears to be no excuse for it other than money-making, as Corey[0] famously mentioned. This hurts us in particular because we process so much data that this matters - right now, our (already exorbitant) cloud bill is a time bomb that is expected to go up on the scale of 50% or some such. Yeah :-)
Despite charging a lot even for internal traffic, AWS never increased pricing for any of their products, as far as I know (indeed, they decrease it over time..). That says something about GCP's reputation - it's a problem unique to Google Cloud, afaik. It breaks the fundamental trust in the platform.
The thing is that Hetzner is unfortunately still missing some of the low hanging fruit cloud services.
I'm building a product that intends to bridge that gap[0] -- but I think it should be done in a way that works for any provider. There are so many other smaller providers out there with decent prices, but that are completely missing the services.
It's been getting better recently though! Aiven also just raised a bunch of money, so maybe we'll see a decoupling of services from the same to multiple clouds as they expand as well.
This combined with something like Doku gives one a sense of what could be possible.