“Dockerizing” Your Side Projects aka Moving all your side projects off of Heroku

Now that Heroku has discontinued its free plan I had the pleasure of taking 9 years of side projects and trying to figure out where to host it. A couple weekends later I ended up with a solution that I am really happy with:

Everything uses the same docker-compose (for the most part):

1. Web server with Flask
2. Database with Postgres
3. Backups of database with prodrigestivill/postgres-backup-local

Using a logdna docker container all the output goes to LogDNA (now mezmo) (costs only dollars a month). Everything runs on a 10$ month DO server. Memory usage has increased in a significant but manageable way (excluding the one time memory leak).

I use certbot (no cost) for https if needed.

I’m still paying ~50-60$/month on heroku for production projects that I don’t feel comfortable taking off yet. I anticipate moving the smaller paid projects over the next year.

The only thing I wish I could find was some sort of monitoring tool to tell me when a docker container is ‘not working’ anymore.