Josh Arnold
Jul 21, 2017 · 1 min read

I think a very valid and easy choice for many RoR apps that become popular is to ditch Heroku or other big name Ruby PaaS providers and go to something like Linode and DigitalOcean.

I manage a fairly popular RoR application (110,000 users, 6 million pageviews per month) that uses about 15 servers now of varying sizes between 1VCPU/512MB to 6VCPU/12GB and it only costs me a couple hundred per month; to do the same on Heroku would put you easily into the $2500+ range. As you point out in your article, many popular apps are still ran by small teams with low budgets (in my case a one man shop), so saving $2000+ per month by simply switching to VPS is a very huge win and better performance, too! Learning how to setup your own VPS is quite easy and has very good tutorials online.

I think the initial transition took about 1 month and maybe 30 total man-hours. Since then I’ve learned a lot and expanded on my server infrastructure, but it is almost entirely self maintained. I rarely have to intervene.

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    Josh Arnold

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