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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

This looks useful. HostGator will host a web site for $3.96 a month. You can't have any long-running processes. You're limited to CGI, PHP, and static pages. For low-traffic web sites that need some modest amount of host-side processing, that's an effective solution. There's nothing wrong with running a Javascript engine instead of the usual Perl or Python engines under CGI.

If your e-commerce site does one sale a minute, you don't need Docker containers running on AWS instances behind a content delivery network.

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I'm not familiar with the benefits of HostGator but how is this better than spinning up a free Heroku dyno to serve your node.js app?

That's also a very effective solution for low-traffic sites with a modest amount of host-side processing and more than enough for one sale a minute.

It's got great options for 3rd-party service integration too (e.g. free MongoDB hosting for < 512mb with MongoLab), and a very node.js friendly environment / deployment workflow.

Not trolling, genuinely curious what the benefit of this would be as an alternative.

Free dynos shutdown every hour when it's not active.Starting up can take next to 10 seconds.Furthermore it's a free service,I don't think people should abuse their generous offer meant for testing purpose. There is no guarantee they will continue offering free dynos forever.

Some people got burned recently hosting mongodb servers on a popular Saas that used to provide free mongodb hosting.Now that Saas is paid only,and though they aren't deleting existing test dbs,they could choose to do it at anytime.

One shouldn't consider free offers fit for any production purpose.

Like you wouldn't use free domains for a production app would you ?

I don't think it's just meant for testing. They choose to make the first dyno free so people will build on their platform. I have a couple of low traffic production apps that run fine at one dyno. If these apps ever get more traffic then maybe I'll scale them up and Heroku will get some money. I think that's the deal that Heroku is offering. I don't think I'm abusing their "generous offer". It's just business, from both sides.

How is this better than spinning up a free Heroku dyno to serve your node.js app?

Heroku's free service is more limited than it was in 2012. Current policy: "Heroku comes with 750 free dyno hours for development use. Beyond that you must pay for what you use."

That's 750 per month (a nice round number to cover a 31 day month):

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/usage-and-billing#750-...

How is that different from 2012 (or earlier)? I've had stuff on Heroku for years, never had a problem with this.

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