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.
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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.
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Good catch! Didn’t know that.
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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.
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We ran a production app on the free tier for a year-and-a-half using a pinger to keep-alive. Here you can see over a full year it was up 99.92%!
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.
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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.
well to be honest if we had at least one visitor per interval it would self-sustain.
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.
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Hey all,
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 
Cheers,
Evan
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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.
Ehh…
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Wow. So, all packages demos are soon gone.
This is huge. It was a great benefit of using Meteor 
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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
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Read this thread:
I’d really like to reiterate that I think there is a space for the free tier. Demo apps etc. But this would only work of MDG made it impossible for people to abuse the service and run production apps.
Too many people are sad because their free stuff is getting taken away but I think the real issue has been what that free stuff has been capable of.
Reposition it:
- give developers 1 free container on the current system for each package they have uploaded. Potentially limit it to packages with x downloads, stars etc. Limit the max the max they can have. Or have package developers apply.
- non package developers can still use the current system but it gets torn down in 4hr, url can’t be reused for 24 hrs. Limit size of app and db.
This will stop abusers, from those attempting to run prod apps even to people trying to use it as a dev server (more than a 4hr uptime and people may use it all day during their work day.) but will also give packages a meteor supported demo space and give presenters, hack spaces, conferences the ability to show off how easy meteor is with meteor deploy.
On the other hand, I don’t see the finances and have no idea how many people are abusing the system with ‘production’ apps. Maybe what I just suggested would make no difference.
I’m that case there making the free tier paid for could work. I’d pay a couple bucks a month to be able to wind up a handful of servers on the current system. I just love the ability to show off Meteor and get people interested.
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What do you mean “abusing” ?
Some people could have forgotten they had apps.
Some people are were not aware of apps they don’t currently need.
Some people did not bother to update outdated demos or projects.
But none of them “abused” the system. It was MDG’s promise to provide support for free-deployment environment, MDG did not request Meteor developers to somehow flag their projects or keep them relevant, did not restrict projects to “a kind-of-type” nor “per-user”.
If MDG first provided us a conversation “hey people, we can’t keep up like this, lets change something”, everyone would be alright, production apps would move to paid hosting, demos to separated one, but nope - “we’re done with free tier, get out”.
We all understand the reason. But, personally, I dislike the way they decided to finish it up.
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How well you use the opportunity to turn free tiers into paid customers is all about how well you do your marketing homework and analyze the effectiveness of your campaigns to convert them. Obviously it also depends heavily on your product, if it sucks no one will pay for it, no matter how good your marketing conversion process is.
Just saying, for me it’s a missed opportunity but then again I said it before. Good coders aren’t good marketeers. @awatson1978 pointed this flaw in their communication skills in her first post, which was right on the money.
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Hmm, I think they’re closing free *.meteor.com hosting because of guys like you, who used dirty hacks to run production app on demo hosting!
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I believe the big issue was actually the sheer number of MongoDB databases
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This is not a solution. Yes, you can spin a copy for most popular packages, but what about less popular ones / the ones, where the author didn’t see this post / new packages / useful demos of package combinations?
For me, this was the best part of meteor deploy.
Meteor will be soon just a set of npm packages with no benefits or differences from just another set of packages from npm, named whatever you like.
Galaxy is a small bonus and I think later it will be available for all js apps.
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