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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

#51

Post by tasteup »

brettgoulder wrote: post #40
matthewcford wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, basically killing most free apps, sad times.

Hey, I am the PM for this project. It's not our intent to kill free apps. I love weekend hacks and small pet projects myself and Free dynos are still perfect for that. What we've found is that 1000 hours covered about 95% of the Free dyno usage on the platform. In most cases, if you have a bunch of Free apps, they're usually sleeping since they're not receiving traffic. I'd love to hear any additional feedback. You c…

I have many free apps as well as paid apps running. But I always used Heroku because I didn't have to worry about limitations unless a particular app has high volume. Now that it's become a monstrous burden, I'll definitely be moving most of my apps to a vps/DigitalOcean.

You just lost a huge number of free apps that could potentially become paid apps.

TLDR: Hassle of keeping track of account wide dyno use > hassle of running on vps

Re: Announcing Heroku Free SSL Beta and Flexible Dyno Hours

#52

Post by tasteup »

detaro wrote: post #30
tlrobinson wrote: post #23

"Flexible dyno hours" is some nice marketing spin. 550 hours a month works out to one application running 18 hours a day, whereas previously you could have an unlimited number of apps running up to 18 hours per day.

But you get 1000 free hours? (if you give them credit card data) If you just want one 24h-app + a bit that's better, if you can live with <=18h for all your apps it is worse.

I think it's time to move away from Heroku or create multiple accounts to pool together "low usage" apps.

Before // After

18h for every app // 24h for one app

Re: Announcing Heroku Free SSL Beta and Flexible Dyno Hours

#55

Post by fomb »

drinchev wrote: post #50
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 fo…

I disagree that you're bound. Most of the way you run your apps on Heroku works the same way anywhere, or can do with only the smallest amount of work. IMO if you want to migrate away, the biggest job is filling the gaps that Heroku provide for you, and don't realize they do until you don't have them anymore.

Re: Announcing Heroku Free SSL Beta and Flexible Dyno Hours

#56

Post by fomb »

koolba wrote: post #17

(emphasis mine) > We also help you keep an eye on your consumption by sending an email notification if you consume more than 80% of the free hours in a month. Should you reach 100%, we will notify again and all free dynos will stop running until the end of the month. At the beginning of the new month, your free dyno hours are replenished and we spin the dynos back up. You can avoid running out of free dyno hours by u…

I don't think my new month is the same time as your new month. I guess it's when we signed up / deployed first time.

Re: Announcing Heroku Free SSL Beta and Flexible Dyno Hours

#57

Post by tedmiston »

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

PythonAnywhere is kind of like that.

The hacker plan base cost is $5/mo + $2/mo per web app.

https://www.pythonanywhere.com/pricing/

Re: Announcing Heroku Free SSL Beta and Flexible Dyno Hours

#58

Post by RangerScience »

fooey wrote: post #45
RangerScience wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I definitely see my hobby dynos go to sleep. I don't try to get those sites indexed on search engines, tho, but (as you might be able to tell from my verbage), I also don't do anything to keep them off. Still, they're asleep. Maybe there's a default robots.txt that tells them not to index, that can be served by a sleeping dyno?

Re: Announcing Heroku Free SSL Beta and Flexible Dyno Hours

#59

Post by fishtoaster »

brettgoulder wrote: post #34
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…

Hey, I am the PM for this project. This is really great feedback, thank you for that. We still intend for customers to use Free dynos for their small personal projects, toys, experiments, weekend hacks, etc. If this feels too limiting, I'd love to hear your feedback. Please feel free to reach out at brett@heroku.com and I'll happy to help out.

Hey Brett- it seems like Heroku would still be great... for exactly one personal project. If I do a weekend hack every few weekends, I have to either turn each on off or pay for them. I used to be able to have as many tiny projects as I wanted, and now I can't. I don't see any way around that besides hosting myself.

Re: Announcing Heroku Free SSL Beta and Flexible Dyno Hours

#60

Post by infecto »

tasteup wrote: post #51
brettgoulder wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I am the PM for this project. It's not our intent to kill free apps. I love weekend hacks and small pet projects myself and Free dynos are still perfect for that. What we've found is that 1000 hours covered about 95% of the Free dyno usage on the platform. In most cases, if you have a bunch of Free apps, they're usually sleeping since they're not receiving traffic. I'd love to hear any additional feedback. You c…

I have many free apps as well as paid apps running. But I always used Heroku because I didn't have to worry about limitations unless a particular app has high volume. Now that it's become a monstrous burden, I'll definitely be moving most of my apps to a vps/DigitalOcean. You just lost a huge number of free apps that could potentially become paid apps. TLDR: Hassle of keeping track of account wide dyno use > hassle o…

I am honestly curious how many of the "huge number of free apps" would actually become big paying apps. I suspect its quite a low number.
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