Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

I like the new Ember.js based UI! Nice.

I have periodically used Heroku a lot, but I do have one gripe about them:

I tend to run a lot of low traffic web apps, apps that run well on Heroku's free tier (and not minding the occasionally loading request delay). However, I just don't feel comfortable using a service a lot that is free: being a freeloader. (Compare to Google: they make money off of me because I click on interesting looking ads.)

If Heroku had a cheap $10/month 1 dyno tier (that might have a perk, like staying resident, not swapped out) that was restricted to a lower number of requests per day, then they would get a lot of my business running my experimental projects.

I have considered paying for a second dyno that I don't really need, but $30/month each for a lot of experimental web apps does add up. Not too off topic: I just wrote about how I create a personal Heroku-like experience on a VPS: http://blog.markwatson.com/2014/09/setting-up-heroku-like-gi...

In any case, I think Heroku provides a great developer experience.

I've sent Heroku tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of dollars in business by referring clients over the years. The fact that they've spent 78¢ in AWS fees for my hobby apps causes me to lose approximately 0 seconds of sleep at night.

What's with the entitlement? How about being thankful that they have a free plan you can use, that's useful, and continues to be available?

A referral is - unless an arrangement has been made - a service to the person you're referring, in that you're making a recommendation built on trust and aren't misleading someone.

I don't think nthj was being ungrateful. Referral fees are a service to both parties, and companies often pay referral fees as a thank-you. nthj was merely pointing out that he takes his referral fee in the form of free hosting for tiny projects, so he doesn't need to feel any guilt.

You are probably being downvoted for being unnecessarily caustic. Your point wasn't a bad one, even if I think you're wrong; consider rephrasing with an edit?

I use and have used Heroku for personal projects for quite a while. I don't feel too bad, because a) they only run free dyno apps upon request (idle most of the time) and b) I'm a huge advocate for their products, which has led to my work and several other companies using and recommending Heroku. At work we now have a number of clients typically running 2-5 dynos and other services, hopefully easily covering my freeloading!

+1 Thanks, that does make sense.

So, I don't mean to say that freeloading is not OK, I did it myself without losing sleep. However do consider renting a more capable VPS for personal needs - on DigitalOcean the cheapest instance with 512 MB of RAM and 20 GB SSD is $5. Or $10 if you want 1 GB RAM / 30GB of SSD.

And there's a lot you can do with a personal instance, like hosting several websites, hosting your own MySQL, having your own email server just for the kicks, using it as a VPN and so on and so forth.

I also subscribed for AWS's Free Tier and now I have a m2.micro instance and traffic included for their CDN for one year and I'm in the process of configuring my blog's assets to be loaded from their CDN because I think it is important for my blog to load in under 500ms :-)

True, but on Digital Ocean you still have to set up a bunch of things yourself (deploying Rails/Django etc. isn't just a matter of a git push like it is with Heroku, you have to worry about scheduling backups, etc.) that you get even on Heroku's free tier.

Yes, I know these things are trivial, but even 30 minutes of work is infinitely more than Heroku's 0.

I totally agree for experiments, but for long-term stuff, like your website or anything else you want to stay up, once you configure it then it stays configured - it's actually not 30 minutes, more like several hours the first time you do it, but after that you don't have to touch it again for months. The only thing that has to happen periodically are security updates, but you can configure it to update itself, you then configure Pingdom to send you alerts in case the server is down, then you're worry free.

Granted, Heroku's ease of use is totally kick-ass.

You could try using Dokku:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-...

You could, but the maintainer - progrium - isn't maintaining the repo these days. There are ~47 PRs in the queue - some quite old - and he is actively working on Flynn.

He doesn't have much to do with Flynn either these days...

http://progrium.com/blog/2014/07/01/beyond-flynn-or-flynn-as...

Would love to hear a little more on this, do you mind reaching out craig at heroku.com

So basically you are complaining that they aren't charging you? That seems ... odd.

It's pretty common around here, actually.

"If you aren't paying for the product, you _are_ the product."

If you are paying, you might still be the product

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