These last weeks I’ve been working on trying to organize my domain names and web hosting accounts. I’m running this blog and several other websites on a VPS as a WordPress multisite. The other applications that I am running are small PHP applications. I’ve been looking into running the other applications on Heroku. By moving these away from my current web hosting account I can cancel that account and use it for domain names and their DNS control panel.
If you would like to try running PHP applications on Heroku I suggest you create an account and create a new app at the Cedar stack (for PHP support). Then sign up for an account at Amazon S3. I use Amazon S3 for their cloud storage and keep my transfers and data (less than 5 GB) beneath their free tier to keep my costs minimal. To stay at Herokus free tier you can’t store more than 5 MB for the MySQL database and not more than 10 000 rows on the Postgres database. The PHP applications I’m running at Heroku is using MySQL as a database backend and databases at Heroku can get costly fast, especially when using several dynos.
If you’re not running your PHP application in the webroot, take a look at https://github.com/winglian/Heroku-PHP for instructions on how to change the webroot at Heroku.
Advantages
- Easy to deploy, my old hosting service didn’t support SSH access or any other way to do a proper deployment.
- Cheap (maybe even free…?) for small applications.
- Minimal maintenance since I don’t have to administer a VPS.
Downsides
- If you start adding dynos, it gets really expensive.
- Your Ruby on Rails applications on the free account winds down after idling for a while and has a startup time that feels like forever. That doesn’t happen for the paid accounts. This doesn’t apply on PHP applications though.
After doing this test run, I will definitely look into running this WordPress Multisite at Heroku instead of having my own VPS.
