
Announcing Heroku Free SSL Beta and Flexible Dyno Hours - ropiku
https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2016/5/18/announcing_heroku_free_ssl_beta_and_flexible_dyno_hours
======
josegonzalez
Dokku maintainer here.

I think this is a great idea. Companies have to sell a product in order to
survive. At work, we pay a small amount of money for the 20 or so applications
we deploy to heroku (nothing critical, just your run-of-the-mill
chatbot/static landing page) and I'm impressed with the product they sell for
such a small amount of money.

Here is some of what Heroku handles for you:

    
    
      - cluster scaling (docker swarm?)
      - resource scaling (docker-options?)
      - centralized logging (docker/rsyslog + papertrail?)
      - metrics support (diamond/collectd/dd-agent + external graphite cluster?)
      - web ui and external api (lol)
      - easy integration with tons of services (plugins/manual work?)
      - not having to maintain your own servers (hire an ops person?)
      - backups (cron + s3/dropbox/idk?)
      - security!!! (cron apt-get?)
    

Definitely worth taking a critical look at whether or not the applications you
are running on Heroku aren't providing at least $7 a month in value to you, as
the above doesn't necessarily come cheap when you roll your own.

~~~
drinchev
Well that's right, but at one point you're bound to heroku service. Your app
will be so deeply configured to work with heroku that migration will take you
a lot of time.

With AWS at least you pay cents and then dollars when you scale. Heroku you
pay dollars and then thousands.

Working with VPS seems so much better. Hire a freelancing Dev-ops guy to make
your provisioning script then when you scale hire an employee for that. VPS
change pricing... Change the VPS. Most of them has APIs so scaling can be
configured programmatically and monitoring you can use service as new relic.

~~~
fomb
I disagree that you're bound. Most of the way you run your apps on Heroku
works the same way anywhere, or can do with only the smallest amount of work.
IMO if you want to migrate away, the biggest job is filling the gaps that
Heroku provide for you, and don't realize they do until you don't have them
anymore.

------
tlrobinson
"Flexible dyno hours" is some nice marketing spin. 550 hours a month works out
to one application running 18 hours a day, whereas previously you could have
an unlimited number of apps running up to 18 hours per day.

~~~
detaro
But you get 1000 free hours? (if you give them credit card data)

If you just want one 24h-app + a bit that's better, if you can live with <=18h
for all your apps it is worse.

~~~
mateuszf
Nice, now I can just put all my apps in one dyno, and I get free hosting. This
is actually better for me. With SSL!

------
spriggan3
TLDR;

Before you got 18 hours a day per app on the free tier (5 apps max)

Now you get 550 hours per month in total for all your free apps (so 18 hours a
day for all your apps instead of per app).

It's clear they are trying to kill the free dynos but who can blame them?

Heroku is still good if you need simple scaling and load balancing for
commercial projects. Heroku main selling point use to be easy deployment , but
with Docker and solutions like that, it's not longer true.

I wonder if there is some room for an ultra cheap "micro" PAAS, like 2$/month
per instance, with 250 Mb space and 128 Mb RAM or something like that. With
the development of new, efficient languages such as Go or Crystal which can
operate on tight configurations, I wonder if this model would be viable.

~~~
RangerScience
Naah. I don't think they're trying to kill the free dyno. I think they're
trying to prevent abuse.

I have one hobby app. I use it, maybe, a hour a week. So that's a dyno that's
on for, oh, maybe two hours a week, but more likely less (since the sleep
timeout is, what, five minutes?). Barely makes a dent in my free hours.

When I actually want this useable, I bump it up a tier for the week or two,
and we're done. Cost of a good meal.

Beside, we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg: Could be this is a change
brought on by deeper changes in the billing system, such that this method ends
up being simpler.

------
fishtoaster
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.

~~~
spriggan3
> 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
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.

------
wheaties
Finally, charging $20 for SSL was just highway robbery. Pure and unadulterated
money grab.

~~~
fomb
I heard it was also sold at cost (of an ELB).
[https://twitter.com/johnbeynon/status/727375051331346432](https://twitter.com/johnbeynon/status/727375051331346432)

~~~
fdr
It's worse than at-cost: it's covering _fixed costs only_. If you push any
bytes (a metered cost) through that ELB, Heroku finances that entirely.

------
BillinghamJ
Hopefully they might soon build in LetsEncrypt support, or something similar.

~~~
dmathieu
You might want to look at
[https://github.com/dmathieu/sabayon](https://github.com/dmathieu/sabayon)

------
sync
> Starting June 1st, when you sign up for a Heroku account you will
> immediately get 550 free dyno hours. In addition, we add another 450 dyno
> hours for a total of 1,000 free dyno hours if you verify your identity by
> providing us with a valid credit card.

Any thoughts on what Heroku gets out of identity verification / credit card
info?

~~~
ropiku
I think it's mainly to prevent spam/multiple account creation. Having
different CCs is harder than just multiple emails. It also makes it easy to
upsell you to paid plans.

~~~
drdaeman
> Having different CCs is harder than just multiple emails.

Don't many banks issue virtual debit cards at negligible or even at no cost?

~~~
ropiku
They do but don't they have the same address & name ? At least it confirms
identity.

~~~
drdaeman
I'm not sure a typical bank card detail form include an address. Usually it's
card number, expiry date, CVV/CSC and (optional, as some cards don't have it!)
cardholder's name. Not sure about Heroku and too lazy to remember a password
and log in there to check right now.

Heroku may have address fields for invoices and stuff, but I really doubt they
can validate it (except for country/state) with bank, as addresses are real
mess. At the very least, not automatically. So, this probably won't work for
abuse prevention.

------
topher200
To answer a question that should have been in the FAQ, there are 730 hours in
a month. So you can run one app 24/7 under the new scheme, plus have some left
over for experimentation.

------
koolba
(emphasis mine)

> We also help you keep an eye on your consumption by sending an email
> notification if you consume more than 80% of the free hours in a month.
> Should you reach 100%, we will notify again and all free dynos will stop
> running until the end of the month. _At the beginning of the new month, your
> free dyno hours are replenished and we spin the dynos back up._ You can
> avoid running out of free dyno hours by upgrading your most successful apps
> to Hobby dynos.

I wonder what the thundering herd[1] effect of this on AWS would be at month
start.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundering_herd_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundering_herd_problem)

~~~
MichaelBurge
My guess is that if this mattered the spot instances would be cheaper at the
end of the month compared to the start. Not just from Heroku, but every
business that has some monthly processing that needs to be renewed at the
start of the month.

------
mikesea
Already full for me: "Heroku SSL Beta is full, please try again later."

------
15155
The jump/effort/cost to just use AWS is lowered with every Heroku press
release.

------
JoshGlazebrook
SSL change is nice, but the rest is just another step in driving away hobby
users. Why not just get rid of the free tier all together if it's just going
to continuously be handicapped.

I'd rather see the free tier be done away with and have the numerous AWS price
decreases passed on to the actual paying customers.

------
JoshGlazebrook
How does this affect legacy dynos?

------
curiousdude99
550 hours a month for ALL dynos is _too limiting_. Oh, and Firebase just got
updated today. Guess what, I'm about to switch to Firebase.

------
IOIIOOO
We are actually in alpha with an SSL add-on for Heroku, so I'm thrilled for
SNI to be an option. I just hope it's supported by the API soon so we can
integrate it.

We are looking for alpha users if anyone is interested.
[http://www.sslfasttrack.com](http://www.sslfasttrack.com)

~~~
killion
Interesting, do you have the pricing set so we know what it will be after the
alpha is over?

~~~
IOIIOOO
We are still working on finalizing pricing. But we won't push any test users
to a paid plan automatically. You will get your first year for free and then
have the option to migrate or go a different direction.

