https://render.com/ has been the closest thing to a replacement we've found (we've deployed HUNDREDS of apps to Heroku over the years, so this would be a massive loss for us as well)
Also shout-out to https://glitch.com/ which puts particular emphasis around community and learning. I use it anytime I'm preparing code for a class, workshop, demo, or open source documentation.
Good question, it is some epic internet lore. It was from Stewart Butterfield, founder of Slack.
He co-founded a game company Ludocorp in 2002 to create "Game Neverending", then pivoted its photo sharing functionality to become Flickr and sold it to Yahoo in 2005.
He then co-founded another game company Tiny Speck in 2009 to create "Glitch", and in 2013 spun out the chat tool the team built while making Glitch to become Slack, which IPO'd in 2019.
(Funny enough, one HN commenter sort of called it happening again[0])
I believe Stewart gave (or sold?) the Glitch.com domain to Fog Creek in 2018[1] and the game's site lives on at a new domain [2]. Some discussion from (Fog Creek's) Glitch's launch about the domain name change at [3]
They were on glitch.me for a couple years before acquiring the .com domain, but they're a relatively established organization as essentially an evolution of Fog Creek.
at one point i spoke to a CEO who had leased a 4-letter .com domain for 2 years for a million of dollar (i don't remember the specific amount) for their startup idea.
i imagine there are businesses which facilitate these types of transactions
The startup is still around. I don't know what the social protocol here is about things like this, but hint.com is still doing its thing... getting doctors and patients directly connected.
+1 for Vercel. Ran my first project on it years ago when they were young and I was stupid. It was so easy to get a front end hosted. I'm still stupid but a lot more experienced now, and still use it for spinning up side projects
Yeah, DigitalOcean is a great alternative. I've been using it for my personal projects for a while now. I think they have a $5/month machine that can do wonders for a hobby project.
They do, I even used that professionally at a previous position.
$5-10/mo box with Dokku installed gave us a heroku-ish platform that could be scaled up if needed. The main downside being that you have to manage it yourself, but it really was quite easy for the scale we operated at. Can't speak for larger systems. But if you need a pretty simple, quick-deploy, small-ish-load servicing then it's a breeze.
Check out Vercel, Fly.io, or DigitalOcean depending on the complexity of the project you’re hoping to deploy.