

New Dyno Types and Pricing Public Beta - theuri
https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2015/5/7/new-dyno-types-public-beta

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csbrooks
Overall looks positive.

Though it closes the loophole for "free" apps which were keeping their dynos
alive by being pinged frequently; now free apps can only be awake 18 hours a
day, and go to sleep after 30 minutes inactivity.

But the $7/month hobby tier should make up for that, right?

~~~
g4k
Actually, it is too bad that they closed this loophole. 7$ for each low
traffic app is too much.

~~~
mplewis
If you're looking for an alternative, you might want to check out
[https://www.tutum.co/](https://www.tutum.co/). They are a bring-your-own-
cloud solution that lets you deploy Docker containers to services like
DigitalOcean and AWS, and they do a lot of the deployment automation Heroku
does.

~~~
joshmn
That's still $5 a month minimum from, for example, DigitalOcean. For that, why
not just pay the extra $2 and skip any potential headaches?

~~~
detaro
For a single app, yes. if you can fit 2 or three on a $10 VPS things look
different.

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mark_l_watson
Even though I have good web engineering/devop skills I am thinking of using
PaaS hosting even more than what I did in the past.

I was looking again at AppEngine (I used to use it a lot years ago, then
stopped) but a recent AppEngine deployment of a small web app my daughter
asked me for (to keep track of what books she has read, with some data import
options) but I ran into a strange case where the beta search APIs worked fine
in local dev mode and not in production. I spent some time tracking down the
problem, then realized that PaaS hosting was supposed to SAVE me time.

Anyway, I have been waiting for Heroku's new pricing plan. I just set a hobby
project to "free" mode and will deploy a few low traffic web apps to Heroku
using the low cost $7/month tier and see if that fits my needs - definitely
worth a few month test. I am mostly concerned that my $7/month (plus database)
apps never get swapped out and the performance is good given that I may only
have just several thousand requests a day (low traffic). I would expect Heroku
to lower the resource priority on a $7/month app that used a lot of resources.

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cdnsteve
The big question I have is, can you control when the app goes to sleep? EG
north american type stuff I don't want going off in the middle of the day.

What is the actual timezone for this? How is it determined when the 18 hours
is available?

~~~
csbrooks
It sleeps after 30 minutes of inactivity, right? So no hits for 30 minutes
means your app goes to sleep. Then the next hit will take longer while the
dyno spins up before it returns.

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zebracanevra
This also removes the 750 free hours, so now you cannot spin up a 2X/PX dyno
to test out something needing more resources than the 1X.

~~~
rapcal
Running 2 web dynos is the leanest recommended setting for production apps (
_obvious reason..._ ). This means, in my case, a steep 45% increase for those
small apps [from $34.50 to $50].

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fny
I'm not fond of this at all. Any small-scale apps (running 2-3 dynos) can see
up to a 44% increase in price, and that's going to be very difficult to
justify compared to the other PaaS offerings:

$100 a month on Heroku vs the previous $84.50 ($50 for 2 1X Dynos, $50 for
Standard Postgres). $44.38 on BlueMix ($25.38 for 2 512MB Instances, $19.00
for 2GB/20 Connections on ElephantSQL Clearly not equivalent, but sufficient
production-grade hosting for apps of this scale). Elastic Beanstalk hosting
with RDS would be arguable even lower.

In a world where cloud hosting is becoming cheaper [0], I'm not sure how this
jump this steep can be justified.

The parts things I'm pumped about:

\- Paid hobby tier is brilliant idea for low traffic apps that require the
guaranteed uptime

\- Paid instances get analytics from the first dyno (I always found it absurd
that I'm paying the same amount for two apps, but get analytics in one and not
the other...)

\- Worker's are now free on free apps, so it's going to be way less of a pain
getting test and staging instances deployed

[0]:
[http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/54b6adba6bb3f7427e5...](http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/54b6adba6bb3f7427e57a38c-800-/screen%20shot%202015-01-14%20at%209.55.18%20am.png)

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theuri
I'm also a big fan of the professional tier / PX dyno pricing. Brings it down
from previously $0.80/hour, which is much more pricey than $500/month with
their new pricing.

Still pretty expensive compared to taking the DIY approach on AWS, but I
appreciate the price break here.

I imagine their markup on top of AWS is still something crazy like 50% or
more?

~~~
bdcravens
Considering that m3.large (7.5 GB of RAM vs. PX 6GB) instances, on demand, are
$0.14/hour, it's probably much more than 50%. (I'm sure they are using reserve
pricing to reduce the price by 50-70%)

Cloud66 gives you most of the convenience of Heroku and lets you use your own
cloud provider (AWS, Digital Ocean, etc)

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dirkdk
I run a simple web dyno with a worker dyno that sends out 20 emails/day. Would
be great to have a hobby dyno for the worker

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dang
More or less a dupe of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9506032](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9506032).
Which of the two stories is best?

