WordPress on Heroku 2019

Is it possible to run WordPress on the Heroku on this 2019? The short answer is yes. It is possible. But is it feasible? Let’s see.

SSL

If we want our WordPress to use SSL on Heroku, then we need at least to pay for their Hobby plan which is $7 per month.

But, that’s not enough. We still need to get the SSL certificate, install it and configure it. This is not a simple process though it’s not a difficult one.

However, this process is surely taking more of our time.

If we want a free SSL certificate, we can use Let’s Encrypt and install it on our Heroku app.

Personally, we haven’t tried this ourselves, but some folks said it works on Heroku.

But, if you don’t need this SSL, you can run your WordPress on Heroku’s Free Tier plan. Let’s see how it is.

Sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity

Our Heroku dyno will sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity. So, we need to set up another tool to keep pinging our Heroku app so it won’t sleep.

Because once it goes to sleep, the first request to our app, which runs WordPress CMS, will take longer.

I doubt we want an app that has slow performance.

Higher cost

Suppose we want to have run your WordPress with SSL, we need at least to pay for $7/month plus some costs for CDN storage like AWS S3.

Because we assume we can get Let’s Encrypt free SSL certificate to run correctly on Heroku.

Don’t forget that we can’t save files on Heroku filesystem. Read the quotes below for the reason.

that means that any changes to the filesystem whilst the dyno is running only last until that dyno is shut down or restarted. Each dyno boots with a clean copy of the filesystem from the most recent deploy. (See: https://help.heroku.com/58GWW5CQ/can-i-use-wordpress-on-heroku)

Now, let’s compare it to other shared hosting monthly cost.

• SiteGround, which many people on Reddit said costly, starts from $3.95/month. Even if we take the medium tier, it is still on $5.95/month. Those prices we saw when we wrote this post.

• VeeroTech SSD Micro tier starts from $3.95/month. The SSD starter is $8.95/month. Only $1.95/month more expensive than Heroku. But, don’t forget that you don’t need to pay for CDN storages when you go with VeeroTech.

• Namecheap Stellar tier starts from $2.98/month. This is far cheaper. Though the performance is also much slower than Heroku.

More hassles

What are they? We try to set up a WordPress on Heroku some days ago. To make it just running on Heroku, we need to set up everything separately.

Let’s compare again with setting up WordPress on some cheap shared hosting providers. Most of them provide us with the “Softaculous installer” to install it. This means we can install and get WordPress running under one minute.

It’s not possible to run it for free, actually.

Even if we try to run WordPress on Heroku on their Free tier, we still need to pay for the storage like S3. Otherwise, it will lose the static files like images when Heroku restarted the dyno app.

Conclusion

We don’t think it is feasible to run WordPress on Heroku on this 2019. However, if the purpose is just for researching and tinkering, then it may worth the time.

Even when we aim to run it on the Free tier plan, the hassles are just not worth the time.

If we really need to run a blog on Heroku, it’s better to use other CMS or just run a Ruby On Rails app along with some models, and those two gems:

• **rails_admin. ** To manage the content as replacement of the WordPress admin dashboard.

• **ckeditor. ** To provide you with rich text editor inside the admin dashboard.