Question

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:

• Is it possible to create a database on a VPS and point my rails app on heroku to use that database?
• If so, what would database.yml actually look like. What would be an example localhost with the database stored outside the app?

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.

Answer 1

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.