Overall looks positive.<p>Though it closes the loophole for "free" apps which were keeping their dynos alive by being pinged frequently; now free apps can only be awake 18 hours a day, and go to sleep after 30 minutes inactivity.<p>But the $7/month hobby tier should make up for that, right?
Even though I have good web engineering/devop skills I am thinking of using PaaS hosting even more than what I did in the past.<p>I was looking again at AppEngine (I used to use it a lot years ago, then stopped) but a recent AppEngine deployment of a small web app my daughter asked me for (to keep track of what books she has read, with some data import options) but I ran into a strange case where the beta search APIs worked fine in local dev mode and not in production. I spent some time tracking down the problem, then realized that PaaS hosting was supposed to SAVE me time.<p>Anyway, I have been waiting for Heroku's new pricing plan. I just set a hobby project to "free" mode and will deploy a few low traffic web apps to Heroku using the low cost $7/month tier and see if that fits my needs - definitely worth a few month test. I am mostly concerned that my $7/month (plus database) apps never get swapped out and the performance is good given that I may only have just several thousand requests a day (low traffic). I would expect Heroku to lower the resource priority on a $7/month app that used a lot of resources.
The big question I have is, can you control when the app goes to sleep? EG north american type stuff I don't want going off in the middle of the day.<p>What is the actual timezone for this?
How is it determined when the 18 hours is available?
I'm not fond of this at all. Any small-scale apps (running 2-3 dynos) can see up to a 44% increase in price, and that's going to be very difficult to justify compared to the other PaaS offerings:<p>$100 a month on Heroku vs the previous $84.50 ($50 for 2 1X Dynos, $50 for Standard Postgres). $44.38 on BlueMix ($25.38 for 2 512MB Instances, $19.00 for 2GB/20 Connections on ElephantSQL Clearly not equivalent, but sufficient production-grade hosting for apps of this scale). Elastic Beanstalk hosting with RDS would be arguable even lower.<p>In a world where cloud hosting is becoming cheaper [0], I'm not sure how this jump this steep can be justified.<p>The parts things I'm pumped about:<p>- Paid hobby tier is brilliant idea for low traffic apps that require the guaranteed uptime<p>- Paid instances get analytics from the first dyno (I always found it absurd that I'm paying the same amount for two apps, but get analytics in one and not the other...)<p>- Worker's are now free on free apps, so it's going to be way less of a pain getting test and staging instances deployed<p>[0]: <a href="http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/54b6adba6bb3f7427e57a38c-800-/screen%20shot%202015-01-14%20at%209.55.18%20am.png" rel="nofollow">http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/54b6adba6bb3f7427e5...</a>
I'm also a big fan of the professional tier / PX dyno pricing. Brings it down from previously $0.80/hour, which is much more pricey than $500/month with their new pricing.<p>Still pretty expensive compared to taking the DIY approach on AWS, but I appreciate the price break here.<p>I imagine their markup on top of AWS is still something crazy like 50% or more?
More or less a dupe of <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9506032" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9506032</a>. Which of the two stories is best?