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Comment by sp_ | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for the note. Whenever salar.ly is linked from somewhere popular I have to spin up more Heroku instances.

Can't heroku do that automatically and scale to meet demand? I thought that was one of the selling points of "the cloud"?

Possibly, but not on the free tier. Anyway, our current plan can only handle 20 concurrent connections to Postgres and I am not planning to pay more to satisfy spikes.

Can you clarify on why not? If you get interest and a big news hit, isn't it important to you to capitalize on that as much as possible and leave a good impression so people come back to use your service?

If you don't have the funds that's one thing and I get it, but seems like spikes are exactly the kind of thing worth spending on.

The website a weekend project, not something I care for whether people use it. On average it has five to ten visitors a day unless linked to from somewhere big which only happens like twice a year.

put a donate button on the site, seriously - for those one to two times a year!

This site is awesome. Can you please put up a paypal link? I want to give you money regardless of what you do with it.

From my impression, I don't think it's any kind of for-profit service he's running where people are paying for and expecting uptime. He's taken a public data source and make it very easy for people to peruse it, and sees that as his reward.

Heroku doesn't automatically scale it for you, though you have the ability to increase the number of dynos. There are services that will do that for you, but it's probably better that you have to explicitly scale so you don't get hit with a sizable bill you weren't expecting.

In any case, there are other constraints than just the amount of webservers that could be causing the outage e.g. the database.

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