CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrubydatabasepostgresqlheroku
Dru
Dru

Reputation: 9820

Moving Heroku Shared Database

I recently reached the 5mb database limit with heroku, the costs rise dramatically after this point so I'm looking to move the database elsewhere.

I am very new to using VPS and setting up servers from scratch, however, I have done this recently for another app.

I have a couple questions related to this:

These may be elementary questions but my knowledge of servers and programming is very much self taught, so I admit, there may be huge loopholes in things that I "should" already understand.

Note: Other (simpler) suggestions for moving my database are welcomed. Thanks.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 673

Answers (2)

Andrew Gorcester
Andrew Gorcester

Reputation: 19953

It would be cheaper to use Amazon RDS, which is officially supported by Heroku and served from the same datacenter (Amazon US-East). If you do want to use a VPS, use an Amazon EC2 instance in US-East for maximum performance. This tutorial shows exactly how to do it with Django in detail. Even if you don't decide to use EC2, refer to that tutorial to see how to properly add external database information to your Heroku application so that Heroku doesn't try to overwrite it.

Still, Heroku's shared database is extremely cost-competitive -- far moreso than most VPSes and with much less setup and maintenance.

Upvotes: 1

Neil Middleton
Neil Middleton

Reputation: 22238

OK - for starters, yes you can host a database external to Heroku and point your database.yml at that server - it's simply a case of setting up the hostname to point at the right address, and give it the correct credentials.

However, you need to consider a couple of things:

1) Latency - unless you're hosting inside EC2 East the latency between Heroku and your DB will cause you all sorts of performance issues.

2) Setting up a database server is not a simple task. You need consider how secure it is, how it performs, keeping it up to date, keeping it backed up, and having to worry day and night about it being up. With Heroku you don't need to do this as it's fully managed.

Price wise, are you aware of the new low cost Postgres plans at Heroku? $15/mo will get you 20Gb (shared instance), and $50/mp will get you a terabyte (dedicated instance). To me, that is absurdly cheap as I value my time much more, and I know how many hours I would need to invest in making my own server to save maybe $10 a month.

Upvotes: 6

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