DigitalOcean App Platform (Nanobox) vs Dokku

I would only get into it if I where willing to pay for the support plan and getting some assurances from the team as to where they are headed. The platform itself is great and can save you a ton of hard work and money. but it's hard to be confidant in it's sustainability.

If you have your own in-house servers or have a cloud server with the freedom to configure any PaaS that you want, then Dokku is for you. So far, I have never run into a scenario where Dokku was not able to fit my needs, after deploying many different types of applications with varying frameworks, languages, and connected services. If you already have a PaaS available, however, Dokku may not be for you.

• Hosting of serverless application
• Hosting of load balancer
• Hosting of virtual appliances

• Dockerfile deployments are an incredibly simple and straightforward way to spin up applications.
• The docker-options plugin allows endless direct configuration of options passed to different docker lifecycle stages.

• The company has not been very communicative as of lately. Not much news, no apparent work on missing features.
• Some components are incomplete as far as some critical features. For example, I use RethinkDB as my database and it's missing critical features like backup and clustering, so It is unusable and they should have made that clear from the get go.
• The pricing on the support plan is vague. I do have the feeling it is actually well worth the money, but it's hard to form a decisions based without more predictable specific.
• Seems to me like the platform's future is unclear.

• Dokku might overreach on its assumptions about how you want to host your app, using its own VHOSTS plugin by default. This may be a pro or a con depending on what you want.
• Proxy port configuration can be somewhat difficult, with Dokku resetting any pre-deployment configuration to "smart" defaults on the first deployment.

Dokku is incredibly well documented and also takes advantage of the documentation and community of Heroku, being essentially the same thing, but in the case that you encounter an actual bug or issue, it can take time for a fix to make it into a new version. Since you manage Dokku yourself, there is no support team to call for help.

It can help you to host your virtual appliance or serverless application at very low cost. DigitalOcean marketplace also helps you to deploy the serverless app or virtual appliance effortlessly. It is suitable for small scale deployment and the process to setup an account and roll out your app via marketplace is easy and cheap.

Dokku is essentially the same thing as Heroku, except maintained by you on the platform of your choice. If you have any experience using Heroku, then you will feel right at home using Dokku. Dokku is an entirely free to use PaaS, requiring only that you have a platform to deploy it on, making it far more versatile than Heroku in my opinion.

• The platform is saving me a lot of time I would have been wasting on operations instead of development.
• The platform is saving me a lot of money as I can easily switch between cloud providers to find the best price.
• I am worried though for the price I might have to pay in case of an unexpected system issue.
• Hopefully I will be able to pay the support plan before that.

• Since there's no investment besides a little time to set up, the return has been overwhelmingly positive.
• Deploying a new app is incredibly quick and easy.