I’m a teacher that uses Meteor to code applications for my school and classroom. To be clear, I currently have three apps deployed on the free deploy server at *.meteor.com, and yes, I will have to do the work of moving these sites to a new place. The public stance from Meteor has been that the free site should not really be used for production apps, something I’ve clearly been doing for over two years now. I re-read that line on the documentation website back in January and asked myself what I would do if I no longer had access to that site. The result: learned to host a site on my personal server. The process definitely had me scratching my head, but also meant that I had a better understanding of the value that the free site had given me over my time using it.
The reality is that Meteor has clearly and publicly shifted away from being just being that framework that has a free one line deployment. The framework has so much going for it, and the ability to create interesting apps is not going away. The shift toward doing what one does best requires hard choices, and the free site clearly was something that did not serve that purpose. It means that those of us that value the free deploy as a teaching tool can seek other options for making it as easy to get others in the game as it was for us.
Meteor has helped me be better at my job, and I appreciate the work of the MDG (and the large community of users) for helping me get to this point.
For anyone looking for “free” deployments you might as well just launch a Google cloud server (best free tier amongst Azure, AWS & Google) or get a free 3 years Bizspark subscription worth 150$ per month.
The conversion percentage is always low. 1% is within what I’ve seen. What matter is not what % converts, but the revenue that brings. I was for instance very close to “converting” to your course, and the only reason why I didn’t was because we ended up not going with Meteor. I came in to your site via your “free tier” of content.
*Guys, this is a serious matter, but luckily it was already discussed here on the forums before. Please take a look at this topic, join the discussion there as you have the attention of people from MDG there and provide more links to such demo apps that you want to save from the fate of .meteor.com free hosting.
Sorry for the boldy bold, but with plenty of quotes this wasn’t visible enough without it.
I just finished getting the next round of Crater Conf videos ready and released this one first, as it is relevant to today’s topics. Will try to get the blog post out in the morning for it too, with code configs and screenshots attached.
I won’t disagree with you here and I am certainly keeping my ‘free tier’ of content around
BUT when the 99% of your free tier doesn’t convert at a high daily cost, it is understandable to want to get rid of that cost. Burning cash on SF salaries and things like office space, dev nights, etc… Given the current funding situation, perhaps we are seeing moves to make sure there is plenty of runway while they try to build up traction for the next round of cash.
I will say it again, hosting is a commodity business and very few places offer anything majorly different to encourage you to sign up and pay more than other places might cost. Modulus, Heroku, and Galaxy are now all roughly the same price for what they offer. MDG has a slight leg up because they are perceived as experts, but if there price wasn’t the same as other options they would lose customers imo.
Yea, tbh I think I might also have seen it here before once. But hey, mistakes are made sometimes. Companies need to change course. Maybe someone wasn’t in the loop properly. So many reasons for this. No need to get upset about something you got for free that wasn’t working 90% of the time anyway unless you’d call the server to restart. I really don’t see much harm. DO costs 5$, this is more than enough for anyone doing it as a hobby.
We now run on Galaxy, and I wouldn’t recommend running production apps on a free tier anymore. But “it wasn’t working 90% of the time anyway” certainly wasn’t our experience.
Because you “cheated” the system ;). Without the pinging that would be the case.
So sure, it’s possible to keep it up 99% of the time but I also wouldn’t say that anyone using the loophole in the system (which is not prohibited) should complain about it being taken down (not saying you did, I’m talking in general). And those that didn’t do that couldn’t make much use with their free hosting anyway for professional use cases.
but yeah if you notice the year, we were very early adopters. Had our first Meteor app in production on Meteor 0.6. There weren’t of a lot of hosting options at that time, so we had to make due. Later we migrated to Modulus, but that was too unreliable so ended up on the Galaxy “Early Access” Plan.
I understand Meteor has their reasons for shutting down the free deployment tier, but I think it’s very unfortunate as we’ve deployed to the free tier during Meteor demos, and it impresses people. It’s a good selling point. Too bad they can’t find some way to keep it around even if it’s in some more limited form.
Sad to see the free hosting go, but thanks for keeping it up for so long! I was wondering if there’ll be any facility for us to set up redirects on our old *.meteor.com URLs? One of my toy projects (spyfall.meteor.com) ended up with a largish following online and I’d love to be able to make sure people still end up at the right place
WOW! Disgusting news.
I could not expect MDG to burn bridges like that.
Come on, people, you could divide projects into Temp and Examples ones.
You could make a simple mechanisms to detect dead or outdated projects.
But you prefered to rather just wipe everything out.
Not just that, but also gave us only 2 weeks to deal with a broken deal.
Maybe you can reconsider and offer a compromise solution? As in - migrate the free service to Galaxy (as you promised you will), but without Mongo databases, which would be the user’s responsibility from now on. Then, for community project (like package demos, hackathons, etc.) we could use mLab or some other provider with free Sandbox Mongo DBs to host them, and everyone would benefit from this!
Also, I don’t think we need to migrate every app, because many of them were just experiments and don’t need to be migrated.
Here’s my idea how this could be sorted out to satisfy both the community and MDG:
create a free package for Galaxy
limit it to one active app at the same time by default
create a way to promote an account so it doesn’t have above limitation for package authors/Meteor evangelizers
