Free (as in beer) Dynos
blog.heroku.com
blog.heroku.com
How is this not a downgrade?
I am one of the people affected by this since I was running a one-page website dyno and had pingdom keeping it out of sleep mode. This is what they are referring to as well in the last paragraph. I didn't know it was that many people doing this, though the solution for me would be a simple one: just allow me to serve static files.
IBM are also putting a lot of resources in to Bluemix which offers a 512MB dyno equivalent in their free tier, it doesn't run on AWS though. (https://console.ng.bluemix.net/pricing/)
Whilst you're right that it is a downgrade, it was clearly iffy to be using Heroku for free 24/7 hosting with essentially no downside on our end. I had no qualms however because it was just so expensive to move up to any other tier and it took so long for the Dynos to boot up.
Since they're adding the Hobbyist tier at only $7 I really don't mind this change and will happily swap over to it.
Heroku has offered the New Relic monitoring plugin for free which has this same functionality (pretty much as a checkbox), so it would not make sense for them to forbid this in the TOS.
So, if you're using Heroku to serve up your apps 24/7, how is that not worth $7/mo?
Unless your business is geographically distributed (or otherwise operates 24/7), you can still use Heroku for internal applications for free during business hours (and use monitoring to keep it fast.) If you are serving your public website from Heroku, that's probably worth $7 or more (even as a hobbyist).
So, yes it's a downgrade to users in the free tier, but what's wrong with Heroku attempting to monetize their (most likely very, very) long, free tail?
I am not surprised by this announcement because it was reported on HN a few weeks ago that they were doing something like this in a beta (and the details were not supposed to be released, NDA, blabla). For anyone who was already paying Heroku, your bill is going down.
We actually use the free tier at my business, and this may affect us. Oh well.
And all that for only $7/month. Seems reasonable, for an essential service.
18+18 > 24
I understand that your (and my) particular use case are affected negatively by this, but if it wasn't totally clear what he means by sidegrade, that's about the size it. More compute hours for your $0, but less availability.
i have a bunch of open source, public service sorts of things and I don't know what I'm going to do with them now :(
Seriously though, they're saying that most deployments use less than 18 hours per day, and if they just let them stay up 24/7 regardless of that, they're basically leaving money on the table. Heroku pays Amazon for all of what we're getting for free. Their free tier is a loss-leader.
If they don't spin down your app when it's idle, it absolutely costs them more than if they do. Regardless of how much (or even whether) they bill you for it.
Now none of that's true.
And after all that, hubot still ran pretty damn slow. :(
https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi
Still, Debian only ships nodejs 0.10 (even Sid) for now -- and I'm not sure what the status is for compiling node 0.12 on armv7 (it apparently has issues on armv6 which the rpi v1 runs).
Fwiw, if you can get by with node 0.10 for hubot (Which I think you can[1]?) -- there shouldn't be any problem:
http://archive.raspbian.org/raspbian/pool/main/n/nodejs/
Unless you need to compile your own nodejs binary for some reason?
[1] https://github.com/github/hubot/blob/master/package.json
Don't know what I'm going to do with them. They're useless if they're not up 24/7, but I can't justify wasting $84 a year on them either.
Also, 18 hours daily sounds good compared to the initial 12 hours.
Not as disappointed as expected about these changes :)
We're just announcing the beta today and almost every single customer we have will see savings in some form here. We'll keep the old pricing until the end of January next year and let people opt in at their leisure until then.
It's only a price decrease for people with 4+ dynos.
If you really needed that 2nd dyno for performance reasons, then yeah, it's a price hike.
For 2 dynos the price increase is 44,9%!
I am grateful to Heroku for providing me all this free computing and I hope they get rid of the freeloaders.
I bet most people who need the 24/7 service probably have the money to spare, and I bet most people are overestimating the uptime they need anyway.
On the flip side, for a small flat fee, I can now have 10 processes running on a 24/hr server, effortlessly. I'll pay the 7 bucks for an easy deploy. Most of my projects are going to be hosted on Github Pages or Heroku's free tier anyway.
There's a huge difference between 24 hours/day and 18 hours/day, but I don't think there's such a big difference going from 18->12, so I don't think many people will care about this improvement.
Eighteen hours a day is enough to keep your app running from 9AM to 3AM every day, and unless your application has a global reach, it should naturally equilibrate into a comfortable place.
We are asking that if you want 24x7 wake-time that you pay for a hobby dyno, but if you can let your application sleep when you do, you won't see any difference at all.
Does that sleeping time include the worker dynos? If it does, when do they sleep? Workers can't "timeout" like web dynos can.
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dyno-types#dyno-sleepi...
It's unclear what happens to apps which just have a single worker dyno. Are we meant to use the scheduler to kill workers for 6 hours a day?
They provide 3x512MB gears for free and you can use your custom domain.
If the other URL is better, we can change this one.
Whats the difference between a hobby (7$) dyno than a real dyno?
You can use both 1x web and 1x worker in the free tier too, as long as you abide by the new policy of sleeping 6 hours.
My initial suspicion was that since the hobby dyno has "10 process types", I would think the "1 web, 1 worker" restriction for the free dyno is just another way of saying "2 process types". But would that mean the worker is prorated up to an additional $7/mo?
I think this could be cleared up on the pricing page.
My interpretation is $7/mo buys you two dynos, but not more than one web type, and this seems to be consistent with what the heroku rep here in this discussion seems to be saying. (eg. comments that Free tier actually potentially gets more compute time under this arrangement)
But it's not at all clear on further reflection (that if you do choose to do this 2-dyno 1 web, 1 worker arrangement on the hobby tier, you don't wind up paying $14/mo rather than the total of $7/mo). I think that's what it says, but I'm not at all sure.
Hobby — Run a small app 24x7 with the Heroku developer experience for $7 per dyno per month. Multiple worker process types for more complex apps. Run a maximum of one dyno per process type. 512 MB RAM.
We hope that between the new `free` and `hobby` dynos you should have good choices that support almost any personal or small scale professional app you might want to build.
I have a small scale web application (around 5K pageviews per day) that runs very well on the one free web dyno currently offered. (We do have costs for the DB and SSL). I assume in the next few months I'll have to move it to either a hobby or 1x dyno. Obviously I'd rather move it to the hobby one because I don't need an additional $220 or so cost per year. It would be great to have a few more details on the site about the specs behind the free and hobby dynos!