amazon elastic beanstalk - Heroku alternative

Question

I′m new on development and found Heroku easy for deploying my app.

I was happy until I got to problems:

1. Heroku does not provide an IP adress which I need for a white IP list to access an API. I fixed this with a Heroku add-on proxy called Fixie. That is free if under 500 request per month.

2. The Heroku free plan sleeps after 30 min of inactivity. My app needs to makes API requests at midnight and this is getting difficult because the app is sleeping.

I was thinking to pay the nearest cheap plan on Heroku which make that the app does not sleep. But then I though why not use another platfrom than Heroku.

Does anyone have some sugestions? Any other platform that give an IP so I don′t worry about crossing the 500 request per month?

I was thinking of AWS Elastic Beanstalk. But as I said I′m new at this.

Answer 1

You can use DigitalOcean: the cheapest plan is 5$ a month and you get a Droplet with its own IP address. The Droplet is always running (no inactivity timeout like Heroku).

The main difference is Heroku provides an abstraction layer on top of the underlying infrastructure (you only deal with the application deployment and management) while DigitalOcean delivers a virtual box (ie Ubuntu), however the documentation is great and you can easily find what you need (ie install Docker, etc..)