Refactoring The-Internet: Fork, Fix, Farewell to Heroku and hello to Render!

With this blog post, we will be taking Dave Haeffner's The-Internet, https://the-internet.herokuapp.com/, a ten-year old web app test site, fork it, investigate using Google AI how to modernize the server architecture, and port it over to a new home at Render.com. Spoilers: The original version, but with updated Ruby architecture: https://the-internet-8uaj.onrender.com/ (takes a minute to spin up the environment)It finally happened. Dave Haefner's The-Internet, a test site I have been using ever since I first started blogging, is now failing to load half the time. It's not the test site's fault. It's Heroku. Heroku, a Platform-as-a-Service site, allowed developers to get web applications up and running very quickly, where they could experiment with the very popular free tier, before switching to one of their paid plans. But according to Gaurav Kheterpal, in his article, The Rise, Decline and Free Fall of Heroku — A Tale of What Could Have Been! (2/2026) Salesforce, which has owned the…