I've hosted my blog on Heroku for a while now. I also have a number of other apps including Journalong that are also hosted on Heroku. I love the simplicity of deploying apps with a single command and for all the backend maintenance to be taken care of for me.

The extra maintenance comes at a cost though. Unless you're running a really small site or web application, Heroku can quickly get expensive. Extra resources are metered and charged for as well as the number of different addons that you can use with Heroku.

As a result, I've started to consider alternative hosting services for this blog and my private bookmarking application. I don't just want more control over my hosting, I want more space and resources made available to me without having to pay extra for it. Yes, Heroku does provide great addons but these can quickly tally up, especially if you need more database space and services like email or logging.

I did this morning have it narrowed down to either using Linode or Digital Ocean, but the low $5 per month tier from Digital Ocean is very tempting for just running my blog and my bookmarking application. I have spun up a droplet in Digital Ocean for my blog and I'm in the process of moving it over to see what it's like.

I'll report back my findings in a few weeks once I've let the blog settle down and I've had a chance to really explore using Digital Ocean for hosting.

UPDATE: I've since killed the idea of moving my blog to DigitalOcean. I just don't have the time at the moment.