Tell HN: Heroku bans 10 year account without notice or explanation

Once again, never ever commingle customer accounts, one bad apple ruins it for all of them. Create a new (in this case, Heroku) account for each customer, no exceptions

Story time: I worked for a major marketing firm that did this with Facebook. we would see accounts go down every once in awhile and it turned out the managers of the companies that cried foul were doing foul things which we would have to resolve (bonus: extra $$$ Too). One Saturday our monitoring started chirping only to find all Facebook accounts were deactivated. It took us 10minutes to realize we did not change our tooling to support their api changes. These are well known name brands that were completely down. That was the first time I have seen an entire company scramble to resolve an issue, but we were back up and hobbling around within 2 hours.

Always separate accounts.

I'm so sorry. This sounds incredibly stressful for you and the businesses you support.

While you're working towards a resolution with Heroku, it might be possible to bring up some of these apps relatively quickly on Digital Ocean's App Platform since it uses many of the same buildpacks as Heroku: https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/build-sy...

This won't help in the cases that need data for proper restoration, but perhaps it'll get some the businesses you support taking reservations again sooner.

One benefit of having chosen a buildpacks based platform is it's easier to move than most proprietary or bespoke approaches.

Ah yes, the old "small company get bought by a huge company, now you can't get customer service on the phone unless you're a whale".

Yep. It's better to assume this can happen. Still very unfortunate :(

I am just finishing https://deploymentfromscratch.com/ for anybody that wants to learn how to do it.

Really sad the hear this. The advantages of a managed service (Paas) are easily out weighted when they decide to shutdown your company...and with Heroku, Firebase, etc there is technology lock-in.

I could recommend Dokku and Ledokku as they are a fine self-host alternative for small PaaS operation needs.

- https://dokku.com/

- https://www.ledokku.com/

If you don't like to self-host, I've been happy with onrender for my PaaS needs. and Vercel/Netlify are excelent for your frontend needs.

The problem with *AAS is one day they decide they don't like you and you're caught out in the rain. It's pretty difficult to gauge when and if that will happen and thus assess the risk.

This is very worrying - do update this thread if you can get a resolution on this. I'm surprised to see this to be honest, but it's a good reminder to all who use cloud services to have a strong "fire alarm" plan whereby you can deploy quickly elsewhere without too much downtime to your app customers.

I hope you get data back at least. Can I ask why did you consider a cloud host initially?

Try metacall instead: https://metacall.io