Well, first things first: we didn’t handle this announcement well. We should have done a better job explaining the reasons behind the decision and helping answer your questions once the post went up. There was a fair bit of one-hand-not-talking-to-the-other behind the scenes on this one. That’s on me and I’ve started a process here at MDG to make sure we don’t flub a communication like this again.
There are a lot of great ideas on this thread. We’ve been reading and discussing them all week. I want to thank everyone who took the time to explain your perspective and help us understand the best way we can help you.
On to some specific questions.
Why the fast 2-week shutdown window?
The reality is the legacy free hosting tier was burying us and we couldn’t afford to keep it up for much longer while also working on Galaxy.
The database was the hardest part, as we’ve discussed here, but there’s more. That system was just never written to support the 50K+ apps running on it. It’s simply not built for what it had become: it has none of the isolation, security, monitoring, and scaling investments we’ve made in Galaxy. It made for an unpleasant situation: we found ourselves reacting to problems instead of being able to proactively head many of them off, and we couldn’t easily put standard processes in place to help us address these kinds of incidents when they did happen. That’s … a bad way to fly.
Time is our most limited resource, but cash matters too. With the growth in apps, the infrastructure takes more and more of it. Fun fact: the weekly hosting bill for the servers that run the free meteor deploy tier? Now north of $10k. A week.
What about free hosting on Galaxy?
We made a promise (with the best of intentions) that we can’t yet deliver on with Galaxy; I regret not being more upfront about this last week.
Free hosting forever, based on Galaxy, had long been our intention. It’s simple to do in concept. But we’ve learned there’s a significant amount of work in building the free tier on top of a production system where we need to ensure high availability and predictable performance for our paying users. We’re not closing the door on a free tier – there are several options we have looked at – but it’s not a quick project and as I explained, we can’t keep running the legacy systems while we develop that capability.
Moreover, the work on a free tier competes directly with other features that customers have been asking us for, such as support for multiple container sizes and for AWS regions in Europe and Asia. It’s a long list. We are eager to build these, and we have to make the best decision we can about how to prioritize them against each other and against a free tier. One guide in our thinking is asking what’s most important for professional developers. It’s the theme of the upcoming Meteor 1.3, and as I said in my Devshop talk last month, you’re going to see us focusing more and more on the features that professional developers most need, across all our projects.
All that said, I think it’s valuable to offer as much of the “one-click” meteor deploy experience as possible. I’d love to find a way to get there, possibly working with a database partner.
Community websites and package demos?
We love the idea of a special program for Meteor-related sites, for example. @marktrang and @rohit2b are working on a sandbox program for that. Expect more from them on this one shortly.
Next
I’ll hang out here on the thread and be on another Transmission soon.
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all in good fun
Same day *.meteor.com goes down? 