Last month we migrated the site off of Heroku and are now using Dokku (an open source heroku-like service) on DigitalOcean servers. We were able to do this because of all of YOU, our Patreon supporters!
We liked Heroku a lot. It's a nice service for projects like ours - small teams without a dedicated DevOps person. Our primary issue with it was that it's kind of expensive for what you get (at least compared to the growing competition). We wanted a little more server performance, but upgrading to the next tier would have doubled our costs!
Dokku requires more manual work for us, but with it we can choose our server and database setup (which we configure in DigitalOcean). For example, with Heroku our web server had 1GB of RAM, and with DigitalOcean we now have 4GB RAM. As a result, the site and API seem quite a bit faster.
There were some growing pains in the past month as we identified and resolved some issues. But we think most - or all - have been resolved. The site has been running smoothly!
This migration was actually the result of months of testing out (and paying for) multiple Heroku alternatives. We could not have done that without our Patreon supporters!
In other news, our focus lately has been on little website updates (features, as well as various rails and ruby upgrades). One nice little feature is that the map markers on the website now show the number of machines per location.
App development has been a little slow, but we expect it to speed up in Fall. We have a big list of app features to add. We just have a little hump to go over first (upgrading some of the libraries we use, which isn't simple).
Thanks and take care!