With Heroku's recent changes to their plan offerings, my hosting costs were suddenly about to increase form $0 a month to $42. To run an app 24 hrs a day, you need to be on the hobby tier ($7/month). Not really happy with that, I decided to look elsewhere.

I had previously explored Amazon's elastic beanstalk PaaS, but this time around I wanted to try hosting my own PaaS. Dokku bills itself as being a "Docker powered mini-Heroku in around 200 lines of Bash". After reading good things about it, I decided to give it a shot on a Digitial Ocean dropet.

After using Heroku for the past 12 months, I decided to try out Amazon's PaaS offering - Elastic Beanstalk.

Setup

I first decided created an application via the AWS console, by following the guided steps. However this actually just creates a sample application named 'My First Elastic Beanstalk Application'. It is not possible to rename it, so there's little point pushing your own code to it.

Amazon provies a Command Line Interface (CLI) for Elastic Beanstalk which was easy to install and setup. Creating a new application could then be initiated with:

eb init