As an update, I’ve been procrastinating a ton on getting my app deployed to a server.

As someone who has only used Heroku in the past, I decided to just give the free tier of Gigalixir a try and I must say that it was a total breeze to deploy to compared to what I needed to get running on my Digital Ocean cluster. Having my app online now is super encouraging and gives me a small sense of accomplishment to keep going and learning more.

My current plan is to continue to use the free tier of Gigalixir until my app exceeds 10k connections (or until I notice any performance roadblocks/limitations).

I actually don’t think setting up Digital Ocean is that laborious, it just feels* risky and I’m concerned something will go wrong considering I haven’t worked with it before.

For what it’s worth i’ve been running https://turtletube.net/ on Gigalixir’s free plan for a few weeks now.
It’s a Nerves app that streams a base64 jpeg over phoenix channels about ~25 times a second and broadcasts it to how ever many clients are connected at once. Not efficient or scalable at all, but i have yet to have any hicups.

I’ve had nothing but good experiences with Gigalixir. Great support on Slack too.

I also got things working on Digital Ocean, a little more work but not too bad.

I wouldn’t compare DO to Heroku or Gigalixir because they are very different products. DO provides very affordable, flexible access to solid infrastructure but it takes work to make the most of it. A PaaS does the heavy lifting for you and makes it a breeze to start deploying, but you get less oomph for your money.

You’ll always get more out of a VPS like Digital Ocean than a PaaS. I’ve been running a small Phoenix app with modest traffic on a $5 per month DO droplet and it barely moves the needle.

Getting a deployment setup sorted can be intimidating still, and it might take a bit of practise to get right; but the result is just as easy as using a platform, but you’re free to use any infrastructure/hardware you like. (Just my tuppence).

Doesn’t this depends entirely on your application’s performance though? If the messages are simply routed to end users then that will require very few resources at each of those levels, but if you’re also persisting everything to the DB that’ll impose some additional work, and if you’re doing some highly complex processing that may require yet more hardware for the same number of users.