Generally, it is all YC hype. HN is biased towards YC startups.
There are other alternatives like Render.com, railway.app, etc but it is clear that fly.io is unsurprisingly overhyped by the HN crowd, especially if you are looking for a Heroku alternative.
Itβs like asking a barber if you need a haircut.
fly.io spends a tremendous amount of time on creating interesting technical content that attracts this type of attention. The company is intentional about this as a customer acquisition strategy. They have an illustrator on staff for their unique art style, for example. Their founder and senior technical staff engage with these posts and answer questions, etc.. It's not YC favoritism, it's a deep understanding of the developer first mindset / ecosystem and targeting it as a company strategy.
That's incredibly generous of you, and it's true that our illustrator fucking rules, but if there are other startup people wondering why we do well on HN, I think it's actually really simple: we write for HN, not for our own marketing goals. One of the first rules in our style guide is that our model reader is never going to use Fly.io, and that our posts still have to be worth their time. I think that's all there is to it? If you can clear that bar, you're all set. Tailscale does that, too, and so does Cloudflare.
There are other alternatives like Render.com, railway.app, etc but it is clear that fly.io is unsurprisingly overhyped by the HN crowd, especially if you are looking for a Heroku alternative.
Itβs like asking a barber if you need a haircut.