Case Study: ReadMe achieves a low-downtime migration from Heroku with Render

How ReadMe migrated from Heroku to Render with 90 seconds of downtime

ReadMe, a provider of API documentation for more than 5,000 companies, needed to move off Heroku after security and downtime concerns, while keeping the learning curve low for a lean team with only one infrastructure-focused engineer. The company wanted a managed platform that felt familiar to Heroku but offered stronger enterprise readiness and more active product investment.

Render provided the destination platform for ReadMe’s migration, including web services, managed Redis, blueprints, and Docker support. ReadMe first inventoried its Heroku services, ran a proof of concept on its main monolith, and load tested the new setup before migrating lower-risk services and then the core application. The final cutover included moving MongoDB Atlas to Oregon and switching DNS with only 90 seconds of hard downtime, while maintaining a lightweight on-call burden and preserving strong performance.

ReadMe

Ryan Park

Engineer