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Announcing Heroku Free SSL Beta and Flexible Dyno Hours

blog.heroku.com

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Re: Announcing Heroku Free SSL Beta and Flexible Dyno Hours

#41

Post by petercooper »

spriggan3 wrote: post #35

TLDR; Before you got 18 hours a day per app on the free tier (5 apps max) Now you get 550 hours per month in total for all your free apps (so 18 hours a day for all your apps instead of per app). It's clear they are trying to kill the free dynos but who can blame them? Heroku is still good if you need simple scaling and load balancing for commercial projects. Heroku main selling point use to be easy deployment , but…

I wonder if there is some room for an ultra cheap "micro" PAAS, like 2$/month per instance, with 250 Mb space and 128 Mb RAM or something like that.

Get a €2.99/mo Scaleway VPS (2GB memory, 50GB SSD), install Dokku - http://dokku.viewdocs.io/dokku/ - and you basically have a Heroku-like environment for next to nothing (especially as you can host a bunch of apps on that single instance).

(Update: Didn't know Scaleway was still queued up for signups. Replace with DigitalOcean for $5 if you're in a rush - and host fewer apps per box ;-))

Re: Announcing Heroku Free SSL Beta and Flexible Dyno Hours

#43

Post by doublerebel »

spriggan3 wrote: post #35

TLDR; Before you got 18 hours a day per app on the free tier (5 apps max) Now you get 550 hours per month in total for all your free apps (so 18 hours a day for all your apps instead of per app). It's clear they are trying to kill the free dynos but who can blame them? Heroku is still good if you need simple scaling and load balancing for commercial projects. Heroku main selling point use to be easy deployment , but…

Joyent's Instances/Triton/Docker was already under $3/mo for the 128M instances, now they've just lowered it to ~$2.16/mo (720 hours at 0.0030). I've been able to do a surprising amount on the tiny instances, especially since they scale up/down near instantly.

Re: Announcing Heroku Free SSL Beta and Flexible Dyno Hours

#44

Post by fooey »

fishtoaster wrote: post #28

Unfortunately, this kills my primary use case for heroku which is small personal projects. I have a dozen or so of them on the free tier right now. Heroku was great because I could throw them up for free and not really have to worry about hosting. Now, howerver, I have to weigh any given project against my overall budget of hours. If I put up my weekend project, do I need to kill that project from a few months ago? D…

When they neutered the free tier last time is when I started ignoring them as a useful hosting option.

My approach was always to start projects on Heroku, and then to keep them there when they graduated to needing more resources than the free tier provided.

Now all my projects start on a little DigitalOcean instance, and when they graduate to needing serious resources, they don't go to Heroku.

Re: Announcing Heroku Free SSL Beta and Flexible Dyno Hours

#45

Post by fooey »

RangerScience wrote: post #37
fishtoaster wrote: post #28

Unfortunately, this kills my primary use case for heroku which is small personal projects. I have a dozen or so of them on the free tier right now. Heroku was great because I could throw them up for free and not really have to worry about hosting. Now, howerver, I have to weigh any given project against my overall budget of hours. If I put up my weekend project, do I need to kill that project from a few months ago? D…

Well, but also... if the site isn't in use, it goes to sleep. Next load takes awhile (dyno startup), but if you've got a bunch of infrequently used apps... I don't expect this to effect you. Now, if you're abusing the service, that's a different story...

Personally, I've never had a project that had so little traffic from robots or actual people that I'd expect there to be 4 hours a day with zero hits.

Assuming you have any of the billion spiders out there hit your site more often than once an hour, there's no such thing as sleeping.

Re: Announcing Heroku Free SSL Beta and Flexible Dyno Hours

#46

Post by josegonzalez »

Dokku maintainer here.

I think this is a great idea. Companies have to sell a product in order to survive. At work, we pay a small amount of money for the 20 or so applications we deploy to heroku (nothing critical, just your run-of-the-mill chatbot/static landing page) and I'm impressed with the product they sell for such a small amount of money.

Here is some of what Heroku handles for you:

  - cluster scaling (docker swarm?)
  - resource scaling (docker-options?)
  - centralized logging (docker/rsyslog + papertrail?)
  - metrics support (diamond/collectd/dd-agent + external graphite cluster?)
  - web ui and external api (lol)
  - easy integration with tons of services (plugins/manual work?)
  - not having to maintain your own servers (hire an ops person?)
  - backups (cron + s3/dropbox/idk?)
  - security!!! (cron apt-get?)
Definitely worth taking a critical look at whether or not the applications you are running on Heroku aren't providing at least $7 a month in value to you, as the above doesn't necessarily come cheap when you roll your own.

Re: Announcing Heroku Free SSL Beta and Flexible Dyno Hours

#47

Post by fooey »

josegonzalez wrote: post #46

Dokku maintainer here. I think this is a great idea. Companies have to sell a product in order to survive. At work, we pay a small amount of money for the 20 or so applications we deploy to heroku (nothing critical, just your run-of-the-mill chatbot/static landing page) and I'm impressed with the product they sell for such a small amount of money. Here is some of what Heroku handles for you: - cluster scaling (docker…

To me, it's not whether they're providing $7 a month in value, it's whether running a dozen dynos at $7 is worth more than than running a single $10 VPS on DigitalOcean.

For me, they do not provide enough value. My apps run drastically faster on a VPS than they did on Heroku, and I save a lot of money.

Consequentially, my sites that need more resources than my incubator VPS can provide no longer consider Heroku a viable upgrade path

Re: Announcing Heroku Free SSL Beta and Flexible Dyno Hours

#48

Post by fooey »

spriggan3 wrote: post #32
fishtoaster wrote: post #28

Unfortunately, this kills my primary use case for heroku which is small personal projects. I have a dozen or so of them on the free tier right now. Heroku was great because I could throw them up for free and not really have to worry about hosting. Now, howerver, I have to weigh any given project against my overall budget of hours. If I put up my weekend project, do I need to kill that project from a few months ago? D…

> Unfortunately, this kills my primary use case for heroku which is small personal projects. I have a dozen or so of them on the free tier right now. Heroku was great because I could throw them up for free and not really have to worry about hosting. Well you're using their PAAS for free. Ultimately a minority of paid users are paying for all the free users, it can't go on for ever.This is true for Heroku, as well as…

I wonder if Heroku would have the userbase it does if it wasn't for them being the goto place for throwing personal projects for the last few years.

Clearly they don't believe that kind of marketing to be worth it now, but I'm sad to see that option go away.

Re: Announcing Heroku Free SSL Beta and Flexible Dyno Hours

#49

Post by weaksauce »

spriggan3 wrote: post #32
fishtoaster wrote: post #28

Unfortunately, this kills my primary use case for heroku which is small personal projects. I have a dozen or so of them on the free tier right now. Heroku was great because I could throw them up for free and not really have to worry about hosting. Now, howerver, I have to weigh any given project against my overall budget of hours. If I put up my weekend project, do I need to kill that project from a few months ago? D…

> Unfortunately, this kills my primary use case for heroku which is small personal projects. I have a dozen or so of them on the free tier right now. Heroku was great because I could throw them up for free and not really have to worry about hosting. Well you're using their PAAS for free. Ultimately a minority of paid users are paying for all the free users, it can't go on for ever.This is true for Heroku, as well as…

I don't see the free users causing much server load. It's like how it's dumb for Adobe to go after students pirating their software... They get used to using photoshop and then demand their employer to buy it for them later on when they get a job. The hobby projects get people used to the platform and want to use it later on.

Re: Announcing Heroku Free SSL Beta and Flexible Dyno Hours

#50

Post by drinchev »

josegonzalez wrote: post #46

Dokku maintainer here. I think this is a great idea. Companies have to sell a product in order to survive. At work, we pay a small amount of money for the 20 or so applications we deploy to heroku (nothing critical, just your run-of-the-mill chatbot/static landing page) and I'm impressed with the product they sell for such a small amount of money. Here is some of what Heroku handles for you: - cluster scaling (docker…

Well that's right, but at one point you're bound to heroku service. Your app will be so deeply configured to work with heroku that migration will take you a lot of time.

With AWS at least you pay cents and then dollars when you scale. Heroku you pay dollars and then thousands.

Working with VPS seems so much better. Hire a freelancing Dev-ops guy to make your provisioning script then when you scale hire an employee for that. VPS change pricing... Change the VPS. Most of them has APIs so scaling can be configured programmatically and monitoring you can use service as new relic.

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