Is Heroku a replacement for a VPS? - heroku

We're currently evaluating Heroku to replace the initial workflow of renting a VPS for a small Web App (since we're working on NodeJS, cPanel hosting plans aren't enough, ergo, VPS).
The confusion lies in Heroku's actual usage as even though it's clear it's used as a platform as a service, there is no Disk (HDD/SSD) limit described.
Web App requirement includes file upload capabilities (profile picture, etc) so I'm not sure Heroku is what we need. Can I get a clear explanation on this?

Not a Heroku expert, but...
You could always use one of the various add-ins that offer database support for storing your images until that no longer works
As the usage of your site scales out, you'd probably want to place static content into a CDN.
I wouldn't consider placing files into Heroku that weren't related to running code and honestly I don't even know if you can.
(I originally just wanted to comment, but need a higher rep :/)

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Slow MEAN Stack Web applications

I have three MEAN Stack built web applications hosted on a shared hosting plan. It's running really slow (takes minutes to login and minutes to call the database) and I'm not sure how to optimise the performance. I have created three backend servers so that each application can can call the backend separately. I have ensured that my files are gzipped and are on HTTP3. What else should/can I do on top on that? I can't seem to find much related information online. Please give me any suggestions that you may have!
Would implementing lazy loading help? If so, please share some easy examples because I'm still new. Much appreciated!
I'd suggest moving off of shared hosting and using one of the newer generation developer-focused hosting platforms like Render or Adaptable.io. Adaptable includes MongoDB, so it's great for MEAN stack. With Render, you'd probably use MongoDB Atlas. Both provide free tiers that smaller apps can fit within.
With any of the next-gen hosting platforms, you just connect a GitHub repo with your source code and they automatically deploy your app to the cloud. You don't have to deal with keeping servers up to date, optimizing database performance or anything like that.

What service to use for deploying my flask + dash application

I am building a small application with dash and flask. Where my user can upload his csv/excel file and have a look at the graphs being generated.
I assume the size of each excel file could be around hardly 50MB max / week.
I have 'ZERO' knowledge on servers and deployment etc. Can anyone guide or enlighten me on this area. Also this application is just for an internal purpose so we are not allowed to go easy on the budget.
My random google searches gave me options like,
1. AWS
2. Heroku
Which would be a right option and why ? Considering price and ease of use.
Thanks !
I will share some of mine web dev knowledge, so.. in my company we use flask for all server dev, using many of his libs(like marshmallow, sqlalchemy, etc) and making improvements to them, flask offers you a big flexibility and fast development, but your request thread is poor, so i highly recommend to use a load balancer, the most famous load balancer for flask is Gunicorn, is easy to set and use. For Http server we use Nginx, its like Apache, but make to work with Websockets more easy, and to use with Gunicorn just make a proxy. For the Host, we use AWS, and work very fine for big and little applications, but your application is small and your budget too, so i recommend use the pythonanywhere server, its easy to use and optimized for python webservers. And for frontend we use Vue.js framework, makes our page more beautiful and fast to dev.

Heroku or Amazon to host a backend Rails JSON API? Which should I use?

The answer to this no doubt lies in answering exactly what I need. The thing is... I don't really know.
The criteria for my choice will be price. Whatever is cheapest, unless both are so closely similar and the every so slightly more expensive one is a much better service.
I'm creating an iOS application, and have a Rails backend JSON API that serves my app.
I have a Post/Comment style app. I don't store any images, just text throughout various tables, etc. I shouldn't need much data with no images, and the fact that I will be purging old data (old posts / comments that are no longer relevant are just deleted).
I need a scheduler, likely daily, but guaranteed no more frequent (hourly etc not needed). So I need to run cron tasks daily.
My application does have a user sign-in. Sign-up and you can post and comment, otherwise you can only view. Does that mean I'm going to need an SSL endpoint, or is that not necessary?
Other than that I'm just serving GETting/POSTing data. I don't need anything else that I can think of. As a beginner, am I possibly overlooking anything?
Which service should I go with given the above. This is my first iOS app, and Rails backend (first time working with either), and first time deploying anything to either service, so I'm looking for some advice in this area.
Thanks!
Short googling gave me these:
HEROKU VS. AMAZON WEB SERVICES
Ruby hosting in the cloud – Elastic Beanstalk vs Heroku vs EngineYard

What's a good alternative to page caching on Heroku?

I understand page caching isn't a good option on heroku since each dyno has an emepheral file system (so they wouldn't share files and it would get wiped out on each restart).
So I'm wondering what the best alternative is. I have a large amount of potential files that could get generated in a traditional page caching scenario (say 10GB-100GB) so redis/memcached don't seem like good options here. Redis can write out to disk, but my understanding is that once you exceed it's memory capacity, it's not the right solution to start reading off of disk.
Has anyone found a good solution here? I'm thinking maybe MongoStore. (And some way to run this in conjunction with redis since I'm using redis for some other scenarios.) Thanks!
If your site is 100% static content and never going to be dynamic, S3 may be a good option. You can then create a CNAME to the s3 domain. This allows you to leverage CloudFront should you need it. Otherwise, 100GB would have to go into the database, which is in turn then pulled up by your application.
Heroku's cedar stack allows for custom buildpacks. This one vendors nginx. This would be good if you envision transitioning to a more dynamic site.

Linode backup for Heroku

How would I go about setting up a backup for heroku downtimes set up on a vps like linode? (using nginx/unicorn)
Essentially very simply, but also with a whole world of hurt.
Simply create an instance of your application of said VPS.
Then you need to ensure that you're able to flip your DNS from Heroku to said VPS without waiting for a TTL to expire, or someway of letting the world know your application has moved.
Then figure out a reliable way of ensuring that the code on both environments is exactly the same, and works on both different server setups
Then figure out how you can keep the data up to date in both environments so that when you do need to flip, the data will be the same in both environments.
Then you need to figure out a way to remind yourself to keep this secondary VPS up to date from a server management point of view. Software updates, security patches etc etc.
Then you need to figure out a way that you can notified when Heroku is down 24/7
Then you need to hope that when Heroku is down that Linode isn't
... or just accept that any host will go down, and it can cost a hell of a lot of money to ensure that your site doesn't. To be honest, it's probably better for you to look at some sort of hosting setup that allows redundancy and failover across several locations (which won't be cheap)
There are third party services which provide the ability to keep your site (parts of) up if your server goes down - At least it appears to the user that your site is up but it's not working properly behind the scenes. CloudFlare is one such service. It sits in front of your site/application and performs magic (quite simply). It works with static/dynamic sites - and if your server goes offline then they are able to serve static parts of your site. See http://support.cloudflare.com/kb/what-do-the-various-cloudflare-settings-do/what-does-enabling-cloudflare-offline-browsing-do

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