Meteor.com free hosting ends March 25, 2016

announce
90

I agree that companies need to change course sometimes, but hey they should never forget their bold claims right before the switch :wink: Developer’s amnesia?

Anyway I guess it’s the right decision. Somehow poorly executed and communicated, once more.

1 Like
91

Bye bye

http://fastosphere.meteor.com
http://rank.meteor.com
http://bndr.meteor.com
http://paris.meteor.com

You still have 2 weeks to play with them. Have fun.

7 Likes
92

And do you really expect to have the same amount of people contributing, creating examples and spreading meteor without a free and easy way to showcase their examples or packages?

I’m sad this is happening…

6 Likes
93

This is a very good idea, maybe we should write down all cool open source stuff hosted by free tier :wink:

My websites:

I think without free hosting these websites will be gone because unfortunately I have no time and money for this, I have some other (not open source) apps to move from free tier too. So I think many Meteor devs will do the same. They will stop support for such demo and docs apps.

I don’t mind to pay for Galaxy, but not in the case of such projects :wink: Anyway I hope that Galaxy will be a thing someday (not only for Meteor apps), because I love it… the only thing is that I need a hosting for hobby apps which don’t earn money, and now there will be no such thing.

6 Likes
94

Its always amazed me that Meteor (MDG) offered a free hosting service at all, its pretty much unprecedented but it certainly did help them build the passionate community they have today.

I will miss the free hosting however I have to empathise with MDG and respect that this was inevitable, having run several SaaS companies myself I know only too well what a burden a free plan can place on your ability to move forward, Free plan users are often the most demanding and vocal, which almost always takes resources away from your primary goals and as Meteor continues to grow those burdens would only grow exponentially.

Once you take something for granted (like meteor deploy == free) it feels like your personally being wronged when its taken away, but this gift was always (if your realistic about the viability of it) going to be taken away at some point.

That said… 2 weeks notice is a hard pill to swallow and I think that MDG shuold show the loyal community it craves (and needs) a little more respect and extend this window to 6 or 10 weeks, perhaps stop any new meteor deploy sites in the two week timeframe, but granting existing sites a longer window to get their affairs in order.

My own plan is to host my example/showcase sites on Linode or Digital Ocean and AWS for production apps that have more moving parts.

–

Floyd Price
Meteor Casts @ https://floydprice.com

5 Likes
95

That’s a good idea, but if you really want to save these websites from the fate of *.meteor.com, please paste the links in adequate topic, so MDG can have the list in one place without the sea of other post in this place:

1 Like
96

Come on. Be grateful that we had access to free development hosting for as long as we did. This is not “disgusting news” at all. It was inevitable that this was going to happen at some point. Would you prefer MDG’s funds going to improve the framework instead of wasting it on free hosting. I’m speculating here, but I can imagine a HUGE number of the projects hosted on meteor.com are unfinished prototypes that are just using up storage space and CPU cycles when they are in use. I can think of a few projects that I developed when learning meteor and got to the “oh cool, free hosting, lets try that out” and then the project gets orphaned.

4 Likes
97

Would WhatsApp have ever become worth 19B USD if it had stopped providing its service for free some time before Facebook’s acquisition?

98

Perhaps an alternative/solution/next step to free hosting would be to setup a jsfiddle or codepen style app.

It would benefit package managers more than just free hosting as it would allow devs an opportunity to hack their packages and test it out for themselves in a much more effective way!

The focus for a user would be for testing, learning and experimentation and not as a “free for all” service which seemed to be the model of *.meteor.com :smirk:

…just a thought

99

@jammer there already is such an app, called Meteorpad. And there are reasons for which nobody uses it.

100

I’ve tried Meteorpad but it has never worked for me (at least in the UK). I get a constant “ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT”.

Why does nobody use it?

101

I am teaching a college course using Meteor for Mobile apps and our final project was going to use the free meteor hosting for our apps at the end of April. Is there any way this could be pushed back? Two weeks notice is very short.

102

I’m pretty sure meteorpad isn’t available anymore. I’ve read something about it on the forum and the github seems to confirm : Meteorpad

104

I’ll throw in my two cents, even though my thoughts largely mirror Peter’s & the general consensus

My situations that of the lead developer / CTO of a small company that is close to securing it’s second round of investment. Part of that investment has been secured by rebuilding the old site, ground up; and Meteor was my choice for a number of reasons (fast dev time, brilliant infrastructure for a small team, the looming promise of Galaxy) - it was the technology for tech startups right?

  • Our development has been erratic over the last 6 months, courtesy of a myriad of announced changes, which were often U-Turns of previous decisions. To my mind, 1.3 has brought too many breaking changes if you want to embrace the benefits it brings. I understand they may be necessary, but calling it a 1.x upgrade feels insincere.
  • The loss of the free tier is of no real consequence to us directly, but the way (and timeframe on which) it has been communicated is poor. As everyone points out, we can’t complain about a freebie being taken away, but the manner in which MDG operates shows a real lack of respect for serious developers (those that value the important things like reliability, clarity, consistency; rather than just “new hotness”)
  • This poor communication is a real concern. How am I to know if large, breaking changes aren’t going to be thrust upon us at short notice? It’s not an enviable environment to build a stable business in, and one that I am very wary of now.

I understand that MDG owe me nothing. I am using a brilliant (some of the time) technology for free, and that until now had a free testing environment too. What’s more there was a very passionate community maintaining brilliant packages; all backed by a company with lots of investment.

However, I now regret Meteor as my stack of choice. If it were an option, I would jump ship and start our rebuild over (and gladly give up lots of Meteor’s niceties like DDP); purely because I can’t trust MDG’s stewardship. They often make the right call…eventually; after a lot of indecision and heartache. Quite bummed out to be honest, as I had hoped that they would run their business with more diligence and respect.

11 Likes
106

We’re both circling around the same concern, but articulating it differently.

The “canary in the coal mine” analogy is apt, and I think one of many signs that the tech/VC world is in for a rough few years. Meteor isn’t the only place this is becoming apparent.

We’ve yet to launch, and were going to use Galaxy; purely because I’d rather we concentrated on product, not dev-ops, but again I’m now cautious and will be examining our options very closely.

5 Likes
107

I’m reading a lot of “MDG doesn’t owe us anything”. That’s bull. First, they wouldn’t be where they are without us. Not me personally, my contribution was a drop in the ocean, but us. “They’re a business.” Yes, they’re another business who builds themselves on the back of a community then bites the hand that fed it.

Second, they do owe us basic respect. Don’t take away with two weeks notice something you’ve been providing for years, especially with no migration path. Don’t break promises you have been making for years, especially overnight.

This is an extra bad time to step on the community’s toes, since all the effort at “aligning Meteor with the JS ecosystem” means it’s a pretty good time to migrate to something else. Which is what I’ll be doing now. It was already an uphill battle to convince people to use it for projects, and now the advantages are disappearing one by one, so why bother. Meteor up to 1.1 was a great breeding ground for the future of web development, and now it’s done its job.

To paraphrase the announcement: Thanks for creating Meteor and best of luck on your future projects.

5 Likes
109

@AndreasGalster sorry, but I disagree. And actually, I think there were some more occasions where it was stated that the free tire is not going away. And I don’t care about hosting apps.

I care about demoing meteor technology & packages!
bye touch2s.meteor.com

This is clearly a fast shoot into the foot and I would appreciate if MDG would keep their word on this “never goes away” @gschmidt. We all already do promote Meteor as a company. For free. Least to expect no one should go through the hassle to host & pay for demoing packages and meteor tools.

Meteorpad already died without any engagement to keep it alive. Which was hosted by one developer.

PS: I thought it got much better in engaging the community first after the blaze debacle, but apparently “announcing” the shutdown of 10.000 or so community showcases can still be done in a weak, thought out announcement without any resolution path.

4 Likes
110

Great point @juliancwirko. It would be great to read @gschmidt point of view on this. Does he really want all the open source examples to disappear?

111

I have been using Meteor to play around, try out ideas and for academic purposes. So I have deployed a dozen sites or so which I usually don’t use ever after. This means I am currently not in your commercial target group and will not argue from an commercial standpoint as some people try to do here.

Instead I’ll focus on a few other points:

  • you are breaking the ease of deployment for trying out things. For professional developers that are deploying apps this is certainly a non-issue. For getting an idea, firing up a meteor app, scribble a few lines of code, deploy and check the result on your mobile, it is.
  • you are loosing a big wow factor in demonstrating Meteor for workshops, hackathons and the like. Meteor used to radiate “magic” compared other frameworks. Being able to deploy from “within Meteor” without setting up another account or service in this way was part of this magic.
  • you are loosing people’s trust by breaking the verbatim written promise of a free tier that will never go away
  • you will loose people at the free tier. If somebody is supposed to set up / configure two different services just to get an app running with Galaxy, and people tend to go for free (like heroku and mlab at the moment), why should they switch to Galaxy later?
  • you will now loose new people at the very beginning. There are lots of tutorials, videos, blog posts and books out there and this material changes slowly. After March 25, for those people the first contact will be a disapointment when they find out that meteor deploy doesn’t work the way they think it does.

It should be technically possible to enable a free try out sandbox without cutting into your business and I would appreciate if you would be trying to figure that out.

11 Likes
112

That’s a pretty important thing.

5 Likes