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.
But the $7/month hobby tier should make up for that, right?
Google App Engine also seems like a good place for a hobby app. More constrained, but Heroku is not really that much more flexible compared to totally free-form architecting.
I am looking to migrate a few of my hobby projects to the Heroku $7/month tier and try that for a few months as a test.
I am happy with their new pricing scheme - seems fair all around.
I've quit buying domains for a lot of my "hobby" apps cuz $12 a year is wasteful
That said, for testing and stuff for personal use only the 18h deal is fine (although technically trolls could just go around calling random heroku instances every half hour, burning through the awake-time on free instances). And I can understand that they want to limit free usage.
And of course Redhat OpenShift still gives you three apps for free ;)
However the convenience of using something like Heroku can be underappreciated. I once lost data (docker data volume) on my Digital Ocean instance because I was too lazy to set up backups. With Heroku (and their Postgres service) I wouldn't have to worry about these "administration" stuff, and focus only the idea and the app ... which is exactly what I enjoy doing.
What is the actual timezone for this? How is it determined when the 18 hours is available?
Still pretty expensive compared to taking the DIY approach on AWS, but I appreciate the price break here.
I imagine their markup on top of AWS is still something crazy like 50% or more?
Cloud66 gives you most of the convenience of Heroku and lets you use your own cloud provider (AWS, Digital Ocean, etc)
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.
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.
$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.
In a world where cloud hosting is becoming cheaper [0], I'm not sure how this jump this steep can be justified.
The parts things I'm pumped about:
- Paid hobby tier is brilliant idea for low traffic apps that require the guaranteed uptime
- 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...)
- 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
[0]: http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/54b6adba6bb3f7427e5...
