Migrating off a hosted PaaS
Leaving Heroku, Render, Railway or Vercel without a rewrite: what buildpack compatibility really covers, which add-ons have no successor, and how repricing history predicts the next bill.
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- Heroku Is in Sustaining-Engineering Mode. Dokku Is the Obvious Exit — Here's What It Actually Gets You (and What It Doesn't)Heroku's February 2026 shift to sustaining engineering has teams planning exits. A grounded look at migrating to Dokku: the Heroku-to-Dokku concept map, the honest limits of a single-server PaaS, the ten-command migration, and where the one-box ceiling ends.
- Heroku Retired Its Data Bridge Add-On. The 'Smooth' Migration Path Is the Real Warning.Salesforce retired Heroku Data Bridge and even offered a migration path — but the path was entirely Salesforce's to design, schedule, and re-bill. Here's why a vendor-provided replacement still isn't the same as not being locked in, and a five-question framework for auditing your own bundled PaaS integrations before the next one hits.
- The Heroku Buildpack Compatibility Myth: What Render's 'Zero-Config Migration' Actually Runs OnRender's 'Heroku buildpack support' is Cloud Native Buildpacks auto-detection, not the literal bin/detect/compile/release scripts your Heroku app runs today — here's the real API gap and what closing it actually takes.
- Vercel's Four Repricings Since 2024: A Cost Trajectory Against Render, Railway, and Fly.ioVercel has rewritten its pricing model four times since 2024 — bandwidth, compute billing, CPU units, and seats. A dated timeline of every change, lined up against what Render, Railway, and Fly.io did in the same window.
- Ingress-NGINX Is Already Retired: An Ingress2Gateway Migration Walkthrough for Self-Hosted ClustersIngress-NGINX's retirement isn't a future deadline — it happened in March 2026, and unpatched clusters have been exposed for months since. A concrete ingress2gateway walkthrough against a real annotation set shows exactly what converts automatically and what needs a hand pass.
- Railway's Reliability Problem: Five Incidents Since November 2025, and What an Outage Actually Costs a Migrating TeamRailway has logged five platform incidents since November 2025, including an 8-hour GCP account suspension. A worked cost model — SLA credits, hot-standby insurance, and the actual incident bill — for a team deciding whether to migrate.
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