Heroku vs Vultr – Which is the best?

This article will compare the Heroku vs Vultr according to its features and pricing structure.

The ever-growing importance of cloud computing has left several businesses searching for vendors that offer broad cloud hosting solutions.

There are several different models of cloud computing depending on who wants to control how much. As a result, businesses have to carefully assess different models of cloud computing and select one that best suits their business approach.

In the following article, we take a look at two of the most popular cloud computing models in the form of Vultr and Heroku.

If you have been wondering about which model to choose for your upcoming projects, this post should help you make an informed decision.

What is Heroku?

Heroku is a platform as a service implementation and quite a popular one at that with almost 2250 companies around the world using it in their tech stack.

A PaaS is a cloud computing model where a provider (Heroku in this case) provides the hardware and software to its users for building high-performance modern applications, without the complexity of managing and maintaining background infrastructure.

Heroku was among the first PaaS platforms to use a container-based approach to software delivery. Essentially, it offers isolated Linux containers called “dynos”, which are essentially packets of software containing all the necessary components required to run in any environment.

Containers rely on virtual isolation for deploying and running applications without the need for VMs. Consequently, users can run any type of software without worrying about platform compatibility.

Heroku Features

• Command line: Heroku CLI is one of the strongest features of the platform and allows developers to complete a wide range of actions right from the terminal. You can easily create backups, schedule deployments, verify installations, etc.

• DX: The Heroku Developer Experience refers to the platform’s approach to software delivery. Being a PaaS implementation, Heroku takes care of everything in the background, allowing developers to focus on improving the code of the application.

• OpEx: Heroku offers a wide range of tools for optimizing the performance of the deployments. It offers threshold monitoring and reporting, where the developers are notified about negative trends in real-time. Heroku also adjusts dyno resources or migrates the deployment to a new dyno when the response time crosses a threshold.

Heroku Pricing

Heroku offers a comprehensive pricing structure for all kinds of use cases. There is a free tier for hobbyists, who can test the platform and run non-commercial apps and APIs on the platform. The paid tiers are discussed in brief below.

• Hobby: Starting at $7 per dyno per month, this tier offers 550-1000 dyno hours per month with a free SSL certificate for developing small side projects and proofs of concepts.

• Standard: The 1X tier starts at $25 per month while the 2X tier starts at $50, this tier offers features like horizontal scalability and threshold alerts for building business-focused apps and APIs.

• Performance: Starting at $250 per dyno per month and going up to $500, this tier is for developing high-performance high-concurrency applications with max throughput.

• Custom: If you need custom resources with priority support and additional features, there is a custom tier with features like network isolation and a dedicated environment for high-compliance applications. Contact the Heroku team for more information.

What is Vultr?

Vultr is one of the most popular infrastructure-as-a-service implementations available in the market with over 200,000 customers across 150 countries around the world.

It is primarily known for offering cloud servers with resilient SSD storage, simplifying the cloud environments for developers around the world.

IaaS implementations host computer resources in a public, private, or hybrid cloud and are offered to the customers, who can install and run any operating system on virtual machines without worrying about server maintenance.

It is located strategically in 25 data centers around the world, allowing developers to launch a cloud environment quickly in a location close to their customers. Performance is one of the key defining features of Vultr.

It claims to offer 100% host and network uptime and delivers on it. The CPU and memory are characteristically faster than its competitors, making it an attractive solution for developers.

Vultr Features

• One-click apps: Vultr’s One Click Apps allow you to launch or line up any app or game with just a single click. Be it WordPress blogs, game servers, deployment environments, CentOS Web Panel, Drupal, etc., Vultr supports a variety of platforms. 

• Mount ISO: With Vultr, developers can create virtually unlimited operating system options by uploading and mounting the ISO files for their choice of OS to the cloud servers. It supports Windows, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, etc., and developers can even go with a blend of operating systems.

• Versatile cloud products: Vultr offers a comprehensive range of cloud products for developers to create and launch their deployments. Apart from high-performance cloud-computing instances with fast SSD storage, Vultr also offers Bare Metal with 100% dedicated servers, Block Storage, and Object Storage with flexible bandwidth and pricing.

Vultr Pricing

The pricing tiers for Vultr are based on the resources you use. There are separate pricing models for cloud compute virtual machines, optimized virtual machines with NVMe SSDs, cloud GPU, bare metal, direct connect, Kubernetes engine, databases and block storage. For more information, you can visit their pricing page.

If you can run your deployment on previous generation CPUs and regular SSDs, the Regular performance tier starts at $2.50 per month for 0.5 GB memory, 0.50 TB bandwidth, and 10 GB storage. The 24 vCPU unit for this tier goes up to $640 per month for 96GB memory and 1600 GB storage.

Costs for 1 vCPU and 1 GB of memory on both AMD and Intel CPUs with NVMe SSDs start at $6 per month, where you get 25 GB of storage and 2 TB bandwidth. The 12 vCPU unit for this tier goes up to $144 per month for 24 GB memory and 500 GB storage.

Vultr vs Heroku Comparison

Conclusion

Heroku and Vultr are highly popular cloud computing providers primarily suited for different workloads.

Being an IaaS implementation, Vultr enables administrators more direct control over operating systems. Meanwhile, Heroku offers its users greater control and flexibility over proprietary applications developed on the platform.

Make sure that you study your requirements thoroughly before selecting one for your organization.