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Unfortunately, this kills my primary use case for heroku which is small personal projects. I have a dozen or so of them on the free tier right now. Heroku was

Unfortunately, this kills my primary use case for heroku which is small personal projects. I have a dozen or so of them on the free tier right now. Heroku was great because I could throw them up for free and not really have to worry about hosting. Now, howerver, I have to weigh any given project against my overall budget of hours. If I put up my weekend project, do I need to kill that project from a few months ago? Do I want to start paying for hosting for a site that will probably never go anywhere? I suppose I'll just go back to hosting on DO/EC2/Etc. A single small instance of any major provider could handle the traffic for all my projects put together. It's slightly more work, although there are some cool projects like Dokku that make it less so. Heroku's main selling point for me was convenience and simplicy, and it's been progressively losing that over the last year or so.

markonen 10y ago
Main selling point? It doesn’t sound like they were able to sell you anything.
spriggan3 10y ago
> Unfortunately, this kills my primary use case for heroku which is small personal projects. I have a dozen or so of them on the free tier right now. Heroku was great because I could throw them up for free and not really have to worry about hosting. Well you're using their PAAS for free. Ultimately a minority of paid users are paying for all the free users, it can't go on for ever.This is true for Heroku, as well as any PAAS that has a free tier right now. If you use Heroku for hobby projects you don't need scaling and load balancing, you might need a DB on your instance so a dropplet at DO, or using EC2 makes more sense than paying 7$ for a immutable app on Heroku servers.
- fooey 10y ago
  I wonder if Heroku would have the userbase it does if it wasn't for them being the goto place for throwing personal projects for the last few years. Clearly they don't believe that kind of marketing to be worth it now, but I'm sad to see that option go away.
- weaksauce 10y ago
  I don't see the free users causing much server load. It's like how it's dumb for Adobe to go after students pirating their software... They get used to using photoshop and then demand their employer to buy it for them later on when they get a job. The hobby projects get people used to the platform and want to use it later on.
brettgoulder 10y ago
Hey, I am the PM for this project. This is really great feedback, thank you for that. We still intend for customers to use Free dynos for their small personal projects, toys, experiments, weekend hacks, etc. If this feels too limiting, I'd love to hear your feedback. Please feel free to reach out at brett@heroku.com and I'll happy to help out.
- fishtoaster 10y ago
  Hey Brett- it seems like Heroku would still be great... for exactly one personal project. If I do a weekend hack every few weekends, I have to either turn each on off or pay for them. I used to be able to have as many tiny projects as I wanted, and now I can't. I don't see any way around that besides hosting myself.
RangerScience 10y ago
Well, but also... if the site isn't in use, it goes to sleep. Next load takes awhile (dyno startup), but if you've got a bunch of infrequently used apps... I don't expect this to effect you. Now, if you're abusing the service, that's a different story...
- fooey 10y ago
  Personally, I've never had a project that had so little traffic from robots or actual people that I'd expect there to be 4 hours a day with zero hits. Assuming you have any of the billion spiders out there hit your site more often than once an hour, there's no such thing as sleeping.
  - RangerScience 10y ago
    I definitely see my hobby dynos go to sleep. I don't try to get those sites indexed on search engines, tho, but (as you might be able to tell from my verbage), I also don't do anything to keep them off. Still, they're asleep. Maybe there's a default robots.txt that tells them not to index, that can be served by a sleeping dyno?
fooey 10y ago
When they neutered the free tier last time is when I started ignoring them as a useful hosting option. My approach was always to start projects on Heroku, and then to keep them there when they graduated to needing more resources than the free tier provided. Now all my projects start on a little DigitalOcean instance, and when they graduate to needing serious resources, they don't go to Heroku.

markonen 10y ago

Main selling point? It doesn’t sound like they were able to sell you anything.

spriggan3 10y ago

> Unfortunately, this kills my primary use case for heroku which is small personal projects. I have a dozen or so of them on the free tier right now. Heroku was great because I could throw them up for free and not really have to worry about hosting. Well you're using their PAAS for free. Ultimately a minority of paid users are paying for all the free users, it can't go on for ever.This is true for Heroku, as well as any PAAS that has a free tier right now. If you use Heroku for hobby projects you don't need scaling and load balancing, you might need a DB on your instance so a dropplet at DO, or using EC2 makes more sense than paying 7$ for a immutable app on Heroku servers.

fooey 10y ago
I wonder if Heroku would have the userbase it does if it wasn't for them being the goto place for throwing personal projects for the last few years. Clearly they don't believe that kind of marketing to be worth it now, but I'm sad to see that option go away.
weaksauce 10y ago
I don't see the free users causing much server load. It's like how it's dumb for Adobe to go after students pirating their software... They get used to using photoshop and then demand their employer to buy it for them later on when they get a job. The hobby projects get people used to the platform and want to use it later on.

brettgoulder 10y ago

Hey, I am the PM for this project. This is really great feedback, thank you for that. We still intend for customers to use Free dynos for their small personal projects, toys, experiments, weekend hacks, etc. If this feels too limiting, I'd love to hear your feedback. Please feel free to reach out at brett@heroku.com and I'll happy to help out.

fishtoaster 10y ago
Hey Brett- it seems like Heroku would still be great... for exactly one personal project. If I do a weekend hack every few weekends, I have to either turn each on off or pay for them. I used to be able to have as many tiny projects as I wanted, and now I can't. I don't see any way around that besides hosting myself.

RangerScience 10y ago

Well, but also... if the site isn't in use, it goes to sleep. Next load takes awhile (dyno startup), but if you've got a bunch of infrequently used apps... I don't expect this to effect you. Now, if you're abusing the service, that's a different story...

fooey 10y ago
Personally, I've never had a project that had so little traffic from robots or actual people that I'd expect there to be 4 hours a day with zero hits. Assuming you have any of the billion spiders out there hit your site more often than once an hour, there's no such thing as sleeping.
- RangerScience 10y ago
  I definitely see my hobby dynos go to sleep. I don't try to get those sites indexed on search engines, tho, but (as you might be able to tell from my verbage), I also don't do anything to keep them off. Still, they're asleep. Maybe there's a default robots.txt that tells them not to index, that can be served by a sleeping dyno?

fooey 10y ago

When they neutered the free tier last time is when I started ignoring them as a useful hosting option. My approach was always to start projects on Heroku, and then to keep them there when they graduated to needing more resources than the free tier provided. Now all my projects start on a little DigitalOcean instance, and when they graduate to needing serious resources, they don't go to Heroku.