What exactly is “this” in this particular instance? Redirects? Why would providing redirects for existing (or even future) projects be a liability?
“This” meaning offering a redirect for all apps currently on *.meteor.com free hosting. While this sounds like a simple fix, it actually is a major liability risk since MDG would have no control over the acceptable use of the destination URL or site. While we don’t expect members of our developer community to be bad actors, with nearly 50,000 apps being hosted on Meteor.com today, it is impossible for MDG to audit or prevent abuse if a MDG-sanctioned redirect was offered to every app. In addition, this would require either a lot of manual work to process redirect requests and/or R&D investment in setting up a self-service tool for process self-service requests and ongoing redirect support.
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Hm, how does bit.ly address this high liability risk?
And how that it was a problem until now to not just link to them, but also host them?
Could you then just redirect all existing *.meteor.com domains to http://bit.ly/meteor-app-* and then leave people to register their bit.ly redirect and this is it?
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We don’t host any apps on *.meteor.com. But as the CEO of a company building an enterprise class SaaS app using Meteor we find it invaluable to see example demos of Meteor package addons that we may want to use. In fact, just today we we found a couple of new packages that we might use and they both showed how they worked on meteor.com. You really should provide some way to redirect these app sites otherwise this transition is going to be even more of a cluster@#$%.
Please let us know about these packages that have good demos on this thread. Keep in mind, there are also options (e.g. Github page) that are likely more useful to showcase actual bits more than a free hosting option.
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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Is it possible to provide a galaxy free hosting where the app will be destroyed in 2 days if there is no payment made.
This helps in the following ways
- newbie developers can be taught in meteor during training programs with galaxy as part of the curriculum. This will close the development loop instead of introducing them to heroku / bluemix.
- once someone understand the seamless and easy deployment in Galaxy with his MVP, the probability of conversion from Free to PAID will be high. I feel MDG’s revenue will only increase in this freemium model.
- 2 days will not be a huge cost for MDG & it creates a sense of urgency for a newbie developer to act on it.
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It’s this simple guys, really. They didn’t expect such a huge uptake in usage. Speaks volumes on how kickass Meteor is. 
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I wonder if it would have been possible and better to seek more VC funding in order to maintain free hosting. VCs are more likely to provide funding wherever there is great traction. Think of the history of YouTube and maybe many other big names.
YouTube other big names are B2C companies with tremendous amounts of user traction - millions of users. You won’t wow VCs with likely profitability of Galaxy. Userbase is “low” compared to B2C markets, thus scale has to be considered more pessimistically especially since Meteor & Galaxy haven’t proven yet that they can scale this. All they’ve proven is that they can throw an open source framework out for free and people will use it and they have a few paying customers. Technically they’ve just validated their (commercial) MVP in the last months and are ssentially entering growth stage right now so first they’ll have to prove that their MVP can grow bigger and make revenue now.
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Thanks for the clarification @debergalis. It seems like some sound reasoning went into this decision and it’s good to hear it. One question:
If one of the major issues is with the number of apps running, is there any way that you could just delete apps older than say 24 hours, so that people have the ability to test out an app (especially a mobile app), for free for a short window of time? As long as people are warned about this limited time, it shouldn’t be a problem and it should reduce the number of apps and the storage needs on your end. The ease of meteor deploy is huge for beginners.
Yes, a free-for-24-hours feature is possible. (I’m actually quite fond of
the idea.) But it has to be a Galaxy feature. We’re not going to run two
parallel deployment systems, especially when one of them doesn’t have the
monitoring hooks necessary to diagnose problems and automatically page
engineers.
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As @debergalis mentioned above, we are working with a select group of package authors to migrate their demo/doc sites from Meteor.com free hosting to Galaxy, free of charge. See the details here.
Also, we’ve formalized the ability to request access to Galaxy Community Sandboxes, a free version of Galaxy that lasts for 7-days, no credit card required. While we’ve supported community events (e.g. hackathons, workshops, and Meetups) with generous Galaxy credits in the past, Galaxy Community Sandboxes will make it even easier for event organizers to provide a great deployment option for Meteor apps. We can’t wait to see how the community will put these to use in future events!
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I’ve spent countless hours developing small, useful, open source Meteor apps, all of which use free *.meteor.com hosting. I had no plans to aggressively monetize them, or to try and drive large amounts of traffic: I just wanted something that worked for super small-scale use and as a working demo for folks who wanted to self host.
When Galaxy first came out, I was worried the existing hosting would be axed, and that I would have to move to a framework that is simpler to host. I went and read through everything I could find, and was incredibly relived to read that the free meteor deploy myapp.meteor.com hosting would never be axed. The effort I’d put into free, open-source apps with demo instances hosted on *.meteor wouldn’t be wasted!
The combination of a broken promise, poor communication, and an absurdly short shutdown window makes me wary of investing in the Meteor ecosystem further.
Here are two of my more developed apps, neither of which I had launched or promoted, but both of which I have been using and developing for many months:
readb.meteor.com
ReaDB — read. review. remember: an open-source (423 commits over here) self-hosted Goodreads alternative.
mark-down.meteor.com
A little utility to preview and print markdown — either something you paste in or loaded from a GitHub Gist ID — using different typographic presets.
Enjoy the demos while they last.
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My Opinions:
-
I think what is coming now, free hosting for Community Websites and important packages. People like TheMeteorchef make a huge impact to the Meteor community and their free code examples should be supported so they don’t have to deal with costs when they provide free tutorials for the community. The same goes with important packages which should be free to view as a demo.
-
The magic deploy meteor.com is still a big thing and we should try to find together a way to keep it alive in a new way. I like the idea that the app is destroyed within 48 hours. When Galaxy was first announced a lot of people were shocked about the prices and also that there was no free tier. I think that shows well what the community expects and wants. Isn’t it a bit that easy deployment which made Meteor so unique?
Hope we can figure a way out.
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Just a suggestion, and maybe not easy or maybe too late, but if you could have converted the old ‘meteor deploy’ to the free meteor.com hosting into something that used one of these new 7 day Galaxy Sandboxes you could would have been left with the following benefits:
- Being able to leave ‘meteor deploy’ in the meteor tutorial (retaining the ‘wow, meteor apps are so simple to deploy to the web’ factor that was the experience many of us had when we first did our first meteor tutorial.) Something that arguably had some part in impressing people with the overall platform and keeping them going with it.
- Expose potential new customers to Galaxy - ie provide a way for them to convert from the free sandbox to a paid subscription at the end of the 7 days.
- Still not be left with tens or hundreds of thousands of minimal-value apps being hosted. Ie 98% would expire and disappear after 7 days.
Just some thoughts.
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@marktrang: but isn’t this a bit short sighted?
Okay, perhaps you manage to prevent the deletion of a few useful apps/package-showcases, but isn’t destroying the past just the beginning of destroying the future?
I’m relatively new to meteor so I don’t maintain a package which is used by more than a handful of users, but losing the ability to showcase a packages without spending 23$ a month is kind of insane.
Having to pay as long as you don’t belong to the “select group” doesn’t lead anywhere in my opinion and will lead to stagnation in package development.
Why should anyone continue his/her work on a package which makes meteor what it is?
And why should a beginner even start developing packages?
By the way: why did you kill developer subscriptions? - for most community packages spot instances with 20% downtime and delays would be good enough. I don’t think that there has to be a free option, but going from free/13$ to 23$ is a harsh move. Couldn’t there be a really bad option for open source projects and packages for ~5€? Which is still a lot, having in mind that this is a full DO instance.
Is actually feels like your destroying the ground of meteor.
Looking forward to see where this path goes…
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The end of free hosting at Meteor.com doesn’t prevent Meteor package contributors from showcasing their work. There are free hosting options (Heroku+MLab) and also simpler options like just better documenting your package on Github.
As for the recent pricing changes for Galaxy, we received overwhelming feedback that Developer Edition customers wanted more pro-grade features so that’s where we’re focusing. If you compare Galaxy to other PaaS hosting options (e.g. Heroku, Modulus), you’ll find that Galaxy prices are comparable or even cheaper in some cases. Since Galaxy itself is built on top of AWS, it will never be as cheap as the underlying bare metal cloud infrastructure (e.g. AWS, Digital Ocean). As a developer, you can definitely find very affordable bare metal options as you indicated; the tradeoff will be your time to setup the devops stack required to run a production Meteor app and also the lack of any Meteor-specific vendor support. Galaxy may not be a perfect fit for all customer segments but since we launched last fall we’ve definitely proven it’s a great option for team building production apps.
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Hi Dan,
Where? I can’t see either in my galaxy or Meteor account settings.
Simply log a ticket from Galaxy and the support team will help you out. In terms of account cancellations-- most people are looking for billing to stop so they just stop their apps instead of shutting down their account. We can send you a link to update your credit card information at any time.