I am pretty sure there still isn’t a way to change your card or cancel your account.
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I like the end bit
Thanks for using Meteor and best of luck on your future projects.
-Meteor Development Group
sounds like a recruitment rejection letter… Thanks for applying and good luck in your job hunt 
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OK, I’ll try this next time and let you know how it works out. Not super-thrilled about having to deal with the overhead of who owns apps on which account, but we’ll be fine given that having Galaxy available at all is still a bazillion times better than “here’s your node.js app. have fun learning about docker and heroku, bye!”
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If you have to go to the records, then I think you’re fighting a losing battle.
I had similar impressions of Meteor last year that has slowly been eroded over the last few major announcements.
Whilst I think you guys are doing some exciting things with Apollo and native NPM and cordova integration, it just feels like it’s not the same awesome meteor that made this place great.
Mixed feelings.
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For every one impacted by this announcement and looking at alternatives, I want to introduce you to NodeChef. We have many Meteor developers actively using the platform to deploy their apps. For a starting price of only $9 per month we provide you with both app and database containers to host your app. And it’s free till the end of the month so definitely time to try it if you haven’t already.
Other benefits to using NodeChef includes SSL under both NodeChef subdomain and Free Lets encrypt certificate if you have custom subdomain. Since your app and database sits in the same data center, there is no latency. More on features can be found here.
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I think the free hosting has been in the crosshairs for a while but I still feel the free hosting has some major benefits for MDG and Meteor overall.
- Demos, Conferences etc - It is hilariously nice and simply to Meteor Deploy an app and I really think it perfectly communicated MDGs philosophy of making everything simple for developers.
- It felt like a community visiting a *.meteor.com site, especially for packages with instantly accessible live examples
- New developers - many of the people using Meteor wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for how simple it is to get started and I think hosting an app can be a daunting task for first timer hosts(even with Galaxy) - The free hosting was the perfect onboarding for dev ops.
Abuse is obviously a serious concern and I think too many people have viewed the free Meteor hosting as an actual hosting platform when in my eyes it has always been a testing ground. I would be extremely happy with a severely limited free hosting; only deploys for a handful of hours, destroys itself afterwards, limited number of total hours before must be paid for, limited size of app etc etc.
The main selling point for Meteor was as a show off and its fantastic tool for pulling people into the eco system. Its almost like Free 2 Play for Hosting =P
I’ll be moving over to the paid hosting anyway so its no real skin off my teeth. But on the 24th I’m giving a demonstration of Meteor at a meet up and would of much preferred to use the free meteor hosting just for its sheer simplicity. Yes you can do the same with a paid account but its a little bit more verbose.
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The use case that doesn’t get solved by most hosting solutions, including Galaxy is… creating 20 or so web sites on an ad hoc basis For the most, are just experiments… and mostly will have no use, but may occasionally be gone back to.
I don’t want to pay $180 a month for that. I think maybe < $15 a month would be a good target for that, with the ability to promote any of those apps to independently hosted
With DO and mupx you can nearly do it (just requires some manual steps at the moment), a $5 or $10 droplet… mupx and nginx. Only thing missing is auto configuring of nginx, though there was some talk about it on the mupx github.
I really don’t see the problem. It’s free hosting that shuts down after x minutes without use. I wouldn’t send any potential users to that site. It’s consistently unreachable and has bad latency most of the time. The only downside is people who use it to showcase packages. They will either need to pay or take down their demos which is kind of unfortunate.
Knowing that the site isn’t reachable is better, IMO, than wondering if the site is down. Every few days for the last few weeks there has been a post “Are the *.meteor.com sites down?” well at least now you have a definitive answer.
MDG will have more time to take care of Galaxy infrastructure, pull requests, and everything else related to the actual meteor ecosystem rather than trying to support literally thousands of apps for free.
As to whether or not paying customers will be treated “the same” I would say no. Premium and Enterprise subscriptions have 24x7x365 SLA. Plus if meteor wants to keep their doors open so they can keep developing this technology that we use for free something has to give and I cant imagine that running those thousands of apps is cheap.
Hosting meteor apps is hard which is probably why people in this thread are upset but just imagine how much harder it would be if you were hosting thousands of meteor apps for free.
We are not entitled to free hosting because we use meteor. It is (was) a nice-to-have.
Given the current state of funding in tech I can understand why they are shutting it down. Free hosting is expensive and investment money is harder to come by. Now, instead of the stereotypical “we are going to grow at the expense of losing money” companies are going to have to build sustainable businesses without the hope of VC(s) injecting millions of dollars into the company.
It sucks because it was so easy but $0.035/container/hour is an incredibly good deal.
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Note that Galaxy actually charges you per second - there’s no rounding up, ever. So you could host 200 different apps for a few minutes each, and pay less than $25.
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You know - maybe that would be an option … giving free hosting a cost. Aha. I’d pay a couple bucks to be able to spin up an app with no questions asked. Even if it had limitations such as auto-shutdown and other limits mentioned. I still want to pick any url, ‘meteor deploy myapp.meteor.com’ at talks/demos etc and totally think its worth it for the broader Meteor Community.
but I’d have to manage shutting down the apps?
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Agreed; exactly; and yup.
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Yes, correct - you’d have to take some action from the command line or the Galaxy UI to shut it down. You could probably wrap this in a CLI tool - have a script called run-app-for-10-minutes.sh that deploys, waits a bit, then deletes the app.
PM me and let’s figure out if there’s a programmatic way to enable easy Meteor learning to happen via Galaxy without the complexity of deployment devops.
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Oh absolutely. I think the issue has been that people have truly been treating it as a legitimate option for hosting a production or semi-production application. I think there is tremendous value in the free hosting, not for the individual but for the larger Meteor community, without it ever being viewed or treated as a legitimate hosting solution.
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I do want to explicitly point out that having had free hosting of apps for 4 years has been really amazing and completely unequaled. Thank you all for coming up with the idea to do something like that in the first place, executing so well on it, and then managing to keep it running for this long!
Who’s up for the challenge of building the community-driven free-tier Meteor hosting environment that’s compatible with meteor deploy? @mike?
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Seems like there’s a missed opportunity here…
In an ideal world, MDG could have worked out a way to automatically migrate apps from free Meteor.com hosting to Galaxy + Compose.io (or whatever DBaaS). Then give users 3+ months (at least) after the announcement for the kill date and use that time to send drip emails to Meteor Developer accounts using free hosting and offer to automatically migrate to Galaxy/Compose.io with an initial signup incentive.
Maybe the costs simply outweighed the potential gains, it’s hard to tell without seeing MDG’s free hosting utilization and app stats.
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Ultimately, given the choice between free hosting and more people on the Apollo team giving me reactive SQL faster I know what I want. There’s only so much money at the end of the day.
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that’s the bit that is a PITA… I want an option where I will never get stung for forgetting. but my pool of apps will get stung… They will degrade / shutdown / get deleted even.
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