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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Honestly, I let my class vote and most of the time they want to see Digital Ocean with MUP deploys. I show them Meteor free deploy because it is slightly faster.
I think this is a good point; a potential missed opportunity to turn free customers into paid customers. These are basically warm leads ready for MDG to convert.
@benstr - I’m looking forward to the next Transmission
I would disagree pretty strongly with that. My wife sells eBooks on Amazon as an indie published author. Free book downloaders rarely turn into paying customers in the end. There is a reason heroku and other platforms aren’t offering a true free tier anymore.
Agreed. It’s been a great experience on many levels. Much love to MDG for providing the service these past few years. Looking forward to converting everything to Galaxy.
I do agree, my fathers an author and I’ve worked in sales before, neither of us found much luck in converting from free.
The difference here is that the free meteor service was already running and MDG had made the decision to shut it down. Yes it shouldn’t be the purpose of the free hosting to try and convert, but it was an opportunity to convert whilst they wind down the service.
Would be cool if Galaxy allows us to deploy dev-apps which shut down automatically when there is no activity, they can also charge us for the seconds when these apps run
