So they're getting rid of their free option for another free option that gives you only 18hrs of non-sleep time a day.<p>How is this not a downgrade?
As one of a small niche group who hosts Hubot on Heroku, this is horrible news. Chatroom bots are useless if they aren't in a room 24/7; that's the only reason why we have a keepalive. It's not as if the chat bot is doing a lot of computation, but this really does make it sound like I'll have to toss Heroku despite the convenience factor with it.
The good news is, they decided to keep the custom domain on the free tier. Last news we had, it was only available with the hobby.<p>Also, 18 hours daily sounds good compared to the initial 12 hours.<p>Not as disappointed as expected about these changes :)
Heroku has great services/integrations and deployment is dead simple but when you commit to them you introduce a level of uncertainty into your stack. Services being deprecated, pricing changes and addons breaking are all very real issues. I initially enjoyed the simplicity of the platform but find myself feeling a little jerked around lately.
Stupid people who were abusing Heroku by pinging the apps caused this, now they might as well suffer. All my hobby apps go to sleep regularly and it is not bad.<p>I am grateful to Heroku for providing me all this free computing and I hope they get rid of the freeloaders.
I'm pretty sure pinging services and such were out of their ToS anyway. They're better facilitating non-sketchy free users by giving them the Scheduler and a worker, and have given people who absolutely need 24/7 service a great service for dirt cheap.<p>I bet most people who need the 24/7 service probably have the money to spare, and I bet most people are overestimating the uptime they need anyway.<p>On the flip side, for a small flat fee, I can now have 10 processes running on a 24/hr server, effortlessly. I'll pay the 7 bucks for an easy deploy. Most of my projects are going to be hosted on Github Pages or Heroku's free tier anyway.
Seems like they're walking back from the previous announcement, which said they'd give 12 hours of non-sleep time per day: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9295874" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9295874</a><p>There's a huge difference between 24 hours/day and 18 hours/day, but I don't think there's such a big difference going from 18->12, so I don't think many people will care about this improvement.
Previously, worker dynos never slept. On the new free dynos, you now get a free worker dyno, but the tradeoff is that the app must sleep for 6 hours/day.<p>Does that sleeping time include the worker dynos? If it does, when do they sleep? Workers can't "timeout" like web dynos can.
I understand the thoughts about changing the current pricing. However, it would be really good if Heroku would support the community with a 24/7 dyno for open source projects. It hurts if you need to put in additional monetary effort into projects you provide for free.
So ahh when are they going to lower prices on the "professional" dyno pricing? AWS has only gotten cheaper and heroku has only gotten more expensive.
I've probably posted a similar comment a few times before, but why don't the dynos ever improve? I have no problems with the pricing, but dyno performance and memory has been the same for, what, 5 years? Longer? The whole time I'm getting emails from AWS telling me about cheaper, better instances. Doesn't make sense.
You can move your apps to Openshift <a href="https://www.openshift.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.openshift.com</a> .<p>They provide 3x512MB gears for free and you can use your custom domain.
Also <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9506244" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9506244</a>.<p>If the other URL is better, we can change this one.