Have You Outgrown Heroku or Hetzner?

From MVP to Growth: Why Your Infra May Be Holding You Back

A few months ago, we got a call from a CTO who had just secured funding for their product. Their MVP had worked, their user base was growing, and things looked promising—on paper. But in reality, the infrastructure that had carried them through early success—Heroku, in this case—was beginning to show cracks.

“We have money,” the CTO said, “but we can’t scale fast. We’re stuck.”

Sound familiar?

The Problem with Outgrowing Simplicity

Platforms like Heroku, Hetzner, and DigitalOcean are fantastic for getting started—but when growth kicks in, teams often search for a Heroku alternative for scaling that doesn’t become a bottleneck. They abstract complexity and help teams ship quickly. But at some point, simplicity becomes limitation.

This team’s engineers were experienced—but increasingly frustrated:

“We can’t scale our workloads dynamically.”
“We’re spending hours debugging blind.”
“We need better access control and visibility.”
“We’re blocked by quotas and resource ceilings.”
“We’re firefighting security and compliance issues.”

They weren’t just dealing with infrastructure pain.

They were watching developer productivity drop and team morale suffer. Their infra wasn’t growing with their business—it was holding it back.

Internal Conversations Start to Shift

The company’s leadership started noticing a pattern.

Every new idea came with a but:

“We could build that feature… but infra can’t support it yet.”
“We could hire that senior engineer… but our platform is too limiting for them to shine.”
“We could go after that enterprise deal… but we’re not compliant enough yet.”

It became clear they needed a startup cloud migration strategy—not just a quick infrastructure patch.

The Tipping Point

We standardized Kubernetes across all environments by adopting proven Kubernetes and EKS deployment patterns — but without trying to run a true multicloud cluster.

The final straw?

An urgent need to scale for a new region.

The product team was ready. The business case was clear. The money was there.

But infrastructure said “no.”

No room for rapid scaling
No robust disaster recovery
No way to confidently meet security requirements
No proactive tooling
No room for mistakes

They had hit the ceiling. And worse—they were stuck in a house built for toddlers while their team had outgrown it.

Why AWS Was the Obvious Move

One big challenge came from Azure’s Application Gateway, which was used for WAF and SSL termination.

It worked — until it didn’t.

The number of supported rules and domains in App Gateway was too low for a single-tenant deployment model. To work around this:

We provisioned multiple Application Gateways, grouped by tenant batches.
Explored alternatives like Cloudflare in front of Nginx Ingress Controllers — especially in Hetzner.

This turned out to be the best combo:

AWS wasn’t just an upgrade—it was a strategic unlock.

The widest range of managed services
Global data center availability
Mature, compliant, enterprise-ready tooling
Infrastructure-as-Code support across the board

But the team knew this too: moving to AWS without deep expertise can backfire.

“We might end up building Heroku inside AWS,” one engineer said.
“Except now it’s complex and expensive.”

They were right. You can easily recreate the same limitations inside AWS—if you don’t know the patterns, the trade-offs, the pitfalls.

Why They Didn’t Go It Alone

Sure, they could’ve hired freelancers. But that comes with its own risks:

Freelancers are often domain-specific—networking, or security, or storage—not full-spectrum.
Hard to ensure continuity.
No ownership of long-term health or results.

They needed a partner—not just muscle, but a brain.

Not hourly work, but tested code and proven outcomes.

That’s where we came in.

Our Role: Design, Migrate, Accelerate

We didn’t just “move things over.”

We refactored, replatformed, and modernized—with minimal app changes.

Think of it as adjusting the envelope around the application—giving it room to grow, breathe, and scale.

What we brought:

A clean, modular architecture
We used Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to provision in hours—not days.
Security, DR, scaling, and compliance built-in from day one
Observability tooling that actually helps developers
A demo environment that showed results before any commitment

Their team could see what they were getting before getting it. No guesswork. No drama.

Life After Migration: Tangible Wins

Here’s what changed almost immediately:

Autoscaling kicked in—no more overprovisioning or outages

Debugging was faster, with real visibility into the system

Our cloud compliance and security controls met enterprise-grade requirements from day one

Disaster Recovery was codified, not duct-taped

Cost controls were clear, and waste was visible

Developers were happier, finally free to focus on the product

The app ran faster and scaled globally—no major rewrites needed

Support became proactive, both from AWS and our side

The result?

More velocity.

Fewer fires.

Stronger foundation.

Still On Heroku or Hetzner? Here’s the Litmus Test:

If your team is saying things like:

“We can’t do that on our current setup”
“We need more control and better observability”
“We’re throwing money at infra but still feel fragile”
“Security and compliance are starting to worry us”

Then yes—you’ve outgrown your current home.

And that’s a good thing.

Growth brings change. And change, done right, compounds returns.

Final Thought: You Don’t Need to Do It Alone

Migration isn’t just moving services—it’s about modernizing your operations.

And these days, you don’t need to hire hours—you need to hire results.

We’ve done this dozens of times.

We can provision infra in hours, and migrate stacks in weeks—with tested code, real experience, and zero drama.

If you’re ready to reduce infra headaches and focus on your core domain—we’re ready too.

Oh—and yes, AWS often supports modernizations like this with funding programs.

Want to see what your future infra could look like before touching your app?

We can deploy a working demo in your AWS account today.

Let’s talk.