Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Replit permanently moves to paid hosting after 7 years of free service

noreplit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 120 posts

Re: Replit permanently moves to paid hosting after 7 years of free service

#41

Post by KomoD »

ksenzee wrote: post #39
sorenrood wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I work at Replit. We recently added autoscale (scale-to-zero) & static deployments to our plans. It should be pretty easy for you to host simple sites if you're a sub. Hacker starts at $7/mo. Can read more at replit.com/site/deployments. Alternatively, you can also just add a card and pay for autoscale overages directly.

The problem isn’t that you’re charging too much, or that there’s anything wrong with Deployments per se. The problem is the rate of change. If I have to keep up with a product that’s changing this often, I might as well self-host.

> I might as well self-host.

Then do that, nobody is stopping you.

Re: Replit permanently moves to paid hosting after 7 years of free service

#43

Post by simpaticoder »

humbleharbinger wrote: post #27
simpaticoder wrote: post #11

Rent a $5/mo Linux VPS and be happy. I think more people should do this because what you learn (and you'll learn a lot) is the foundation of everything else. Do this even if you are a programmer used to deploying to sophisitcated CI/CD stacks and k8s. The tight resource constraints (e.g. 1G RAM) are good for you - they make you think, and take care what you run and when you run it. Learn to setup ssh on both ends; le…

I went this route and got taken over by hackers multiples times. It was very worth it. I got taken over by hackers because my password for ssh was "mars". Me and my little brother were sharing it and wanted an easy password (yeah we have ssh keys now). Anyways, we both learnt a lot (htop tmux etc) . I'm always jealous that he got to learn everything earlier than me. But if he's not better than me then I consider myse…

>I got taken over by hackers

I'm a little sad I never was. I started with the Linode "hardening linux guide" and so had a firewall and disabled ssh passwords from day 1. I still have fun looking at the failed attempts on 22 and 443. My server gets so many weird requests, and they used to crash the server. A few iterations and that stopped happening.

Oh, another thing that's worth learning: how to acquire and refresh a Lets Encrypt TLS cert via the ACME protocol. Doing this requires interesting confluence of skills and tools - you must carve out a vestigial http route in your server, and also configure certbot and cron. And working out the bugs takes a few iterations. (You could install Caddy, but where's the fun in that?!)

Making it all work, from scratch, made me feel happy in the same way that when I watch people rebuild carburetors or who build bookshelves from scratch makes them feel. It's not new, it's not innovative, but its good. And it's always more interesting than you'd ever suspect.

Re: Replit permanently moves to paid hosting after 7 years of free service

#44

Post by mdale »

LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #24
folivore wrote: post #7

I get that losing access to things you got used to sucks. At the same time, IMO, this post comes across quite entitled and whiny. Nobody owes you anything, specially not free hosting and/or server time forever. That stuff isn’t cheap and isn’t easy to manage, and they’re paying people and infra on what I imagine isn’t a great return. So, free users are sad because it’s not the free they want it to be, except the free…

“Free” is never, ever free and it blows my mind that people still don’t get this. Like, it’s understandable that you get a little burned the first time it happens, but then you’ve learned that this is how it all works. “Free” in a SAAS context has always and will always mean “no need to pay us until we decide otherwise, end of negotiation.” Every time I look at a free account for some product now, I ask myself if I’m…

I remember an operations incident where we had to quickly pay a previously "free" service that had recently switched their model breaking the scale up of nodes in our system. Did the developer screw up by: 1) not creating a local system for hosting docker images (would detail the project timeline); 2) not well documenting this dependency for operations team before their departure? 3) his/her Manager did not catch this dependency on docker hosting docker images or otherwise catch their change in free tier policy ?

There is some liability on the host some free things your put out there for example "free cdn hosted" JavaScript libraries. If your not at a significant scale that has a business model that lets you commit to continuing to host things you should perhaps not set up free hosting for things.

Not saying it applies in Replit case; they are I imagine a company trying to show revenue growth so they can continue to exist and does not sound like they are breaking production with these changes that are announced ahead of time. Users can migrate to another thing as the article is outlining.

Re: Replit permanently moves to paid hosting after 7 years of free service

#45

Post by sorenrood »

ksenzee wrote: post #39
sorenrood wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I work at Replit. We recently added autoscale (scale-to-zero) & static deployments to our plans. It should be pretty easy for you to host simple sites if you're a sub. Hacker starts at $7/mo. Can read more at replit.com/site/deployments. Alternatively, you can also just add a card and pay for autoscale overages directly.

The problem isn’t that you’re charging too much, or that there’s anything wrong with Deployments per se. The problem is the rate of change. If I have to keep up with a product that’s changing this often, I might as well self-host.

It might not be clear from this post, but nothing is changing (w/ deployments/always on/repl.co hosting) until January 1st, 2024.

Re: Replit permanently moves to paid hosting after 7 years of free service

#46

Post by sorenrood »

KomoD wrote: post #38
sorenrood wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I work at Replit. You can read all about our hosting changes here: https://blog.replit.com/hosting-changes . TL;DR - deprecating always on in favor of new deployments product - migrate workspace URL to replit.dev from repl.co - replit.dev is the new development URL. only available when someone is in the editor. - deployments are the only way to host things on replit From the blog: > We remain committed to…

> deployments are the only way to host things on replit Which is only paid, correct?

Correct. Deployments are paid. But we still have a free (development) tier.

Re: Replit permanently moves to paid hosting after 7 years of free service

#47

Post by dash2 »

simpaticoder wrote: post #11

Rent a $5/mo Linux VPS and be happy. I think more people should do this because what you learn (and you'll learn a lot) is the foundation of everything else. Do this even if you are a programmer used to deploying to sophisitcated CI/CD stacks and k8s. The tight resource constraints (e.g. 1G RAM) are good for you - they make you think, and take care what you run and when you run it. Learn to setup ssh on both ends; le…

Is this actually a good idea? Won't you be investing in a lot of obsolete skills?

Re: Replit permanently moves to paid hosting after 7 years of free service

#48

Post by wonrax »

simpaticoder wrote: post #11

Rent a $5/mo Linux VPS and be happy. I think more people should do this because what you learn (and you'll learn a lot) is the foundation of everything else. Do this even if you are a programmer used to deploying to sophisitcated CI/CD stacks and k8s. The tight resource constraints (e.g. 1G RAM) are good for you - they make you think, and take care what you run and when you run it. Learn to setup ssh on both ends; le…

I currently host a personal VPN and my website (which includes a static blog, a Rust API, and a Postgres database), all on a $6/m VPS. Being a first-time customer, the service provider offered a 100% bonus on the credit I deposited making it even half as expensive. It probably won't hold up when the site has decent traffic, but for now it's the best money I've spent.

Re: Replit permanently moves to paid hosting after 7 years of free service

#49

Post by LapsangGuzzler »

mdale wrote: post #44
LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Free” is never, ever free and it blows my mind that people still don’t get this. Like, it’s understandable that you get a little burned the first time it happens, but then you’ve learned that this is how it all works. “Free” in a SAAS context has always and will always mean “no need to pay us until we decide otherwise, end of negotiation.” Every time I look at a free account for some product now, I ask myself if I’m…

I remember an operations incident where we had to quickly pay a previously "free" service that had recently switched their model breaking the scale up of nodes in our system. Did the developer screw up by: 1) not creating a local system for hosting docker images (would detail the project timeline); 2) not well documenting this dependency for operations team before their departure? 3) his/her Manager did not catch thi…

I think that relying on a free service in a production environment that could cause an outage is a really, really bad idea because you have no SLA or relationship with the vendor. In that sense, you are very much getting what you paid for.
Post reply on HN