originally i put jstpst on heroku during a time where VPSes were more expensive. nowadays i'm paying just about as much for heroku as i would for a VPS capable of hosting postmill.

there will be a number of benefits to this.

• assuming postmill can hook to a s3-compatible image host, we could actually start hosting images on bacbklaze which these days is basically free until x number of images used, which means finally getting thumbnails.
• upgrades will be substantially easier. in fact one of the reasons i haven't upgraded yet is because heroku just doesn't seem to play nice with newer versions of certain postmill dependencies any time i try. it's been long enough i don't remember which specific ones but i recall them being substantial, like server architecture stuff.
• customizing the code will be substantially easier

theoretically, this would be simple as getting a backup of the db from heroku, running whatever migrations need to be done in the upgrade process, then pointing to the fresh new server. i would leave the heroku version up just in case for a week or two (though wouldn't be accessible to anyone) and if things are working fine shut it down after then.

in the move we may lose some of the customizations because the new code base may just have too many incompatibilities for me to bother, but as before i'll have a repo accessible for anyone who might want to make edits. not that this detail matters that much but it's on gitlab at the moment but i'm considering hosting my own gitea in the future.