I'm working on FormAPI [1] as a solo founder. I started on Heroku, but Heroku was a bit unreliable and I had some random outages that I couldn't predict or control. (This was even while using dynos in their professional tier.)
I also had a lot of free AWS credits, so I migrated to AWS. I didn't want to write all my terraform templates from scratch, so I spent a lot of time looking for something that already existed, and I found Convox [2].
Convox provides an open source PaaS [3] that you can install into your own AWS account, and it works amazing well. They use a lot of AWS services instead of re-inventing the wheel (CloudFormation, ECS, Fargate, EC2, S3.) It also helps you provision any resources (S3 buckets, RDS, ElastiCache), and everything is set up with production-ready defaults.
I've been able to achieve 100% uptime for over 12 months, and I barely need to think about my infrastructure. There's even been a few failed deployments where I needed to manually go into CloudFormation and roll something back (which were totally my fault), but ECS keeps the old version running without any downtime. Convox is also rolling out support for EKS, so I'm planning to switch from ECS to Kubernetes in the near future (and Convox should make that completely painless, since they handle everything behind the scenes.)
I also had a lot of free AWS credits, so I migrated to AWS. I didn't want to write all my terraform templates from scratch, so I spent a lot of time looking for something that already existed, and I found Convox [2].
Convox provides an open source PaaS [3] that you can install into your own AWS account, and it works amazing well. They use a lot of AWS services instead of re-inventing the wheel (CloudFormation, ECS, Fargate, EC2, S3.) It also helps you provision any resources (S3 buckets, RDS, ElastiCache), and everything is set up with production-ready defaults.
I've been able to achieve 100% uptime for over 12 months, and I barely need to think about my infrastructure. There's even been a few failed deployments where I needed to manually go into CloudFormation and roll something back (which were totally my fault), but ECS keeps the old version running without any downtime. Convox is also rolling out support for EKS, so I'm planning to switch from ECS to Kubernetes in the near future (and Convox should make that completely painless, since they handle everything behind the scenes.)
[1] https://formapi.io
[2] https://convox.com
[3] https://github.com/convox/rack