Meteor.com free hosting ends March 25, 2016

announce
124

This is a very good point. I get that free hosting is costly and I’m super appreciative that MDG gave us that ability at all. But to echo many on here, two weeks is super short notice. And it’s even more short notice when it was clearly stated to never be going away.

The free hosting wasn’t even the biggest thing about the *.meteor.com URLs. It was that you could deploy with one line and in all of a couple minutes. This is huge for anyone learning web dev and it’s not something I believe exists for other frameworks. The ease of deployment can be enough to convince someone to switch to Meteor.

And of course, it’s useful for demos at any event or early stage prototypes.

So I think you should keep it but put out some big restrictions. Restrictions could be similar to the following

Any app that is not active (no deployments, no users) for a week will be deleted.
Any tutorial app will be deleted within a day.
If it’s a package demo, the package should have a lot of users.
Any duplicate apps or packages will be removed.
People can petition to have their app hosted

3 Likes
125

I get that the folks who develop and support Meteor do not want to be in the business of hosting. however, I think it would be beneficial for the long term growth of Meteor for someone (perhaps Galaxy) to offer a free plan for a single hosted Meteor app (with size limits, etc). this way, developers who are new to Meteor can check it out with a low cost to entry.

I apologize for being one of those new Meteor students who probably created too many free hosted applications without deleting old ones. however, the documentation could have also been clearer about how to manage multiple free applications (how to find your existing applications, how to delete/migrate).

2 Likes
126

Actually they do. The people who created Meteor, Meteor Development Group, are in the business of hosting. It’s basically their entire business model. MDG runs Galaxy.

2 Likes
127

MDG didn’t lie. meteor deploy will never going away. After March 25, 2016 meteor deploy will serve Galaxy :grinning:

1 Like
128

@benstr This might warrant a separate topic, but I’m curious where you’re seeing evidence of this. I’m releasing a SaaS this summer, and was planning on a very limited free tier. But if that’s a failing model, I’d love to hear why.

129

I’m still interested in this idea of “spot containers” I mentioned in a post awhile back. It wasn’t what our production users asked for: they were very clear that they wanted access to the Galaxy Pro features, so we prioritized that work. But in the future, I think it’d be quite interesting to be able to offer “cost-optimized” containers in cases where it’s okay for them to recycle and move to other hosts more frequently.

It won’t happen overnight though. The engineering considerations in building such stuff are not trivial.

5 Likes
130

Freemium is good but too much can harm the company. With MDG offering free engineering for Meteor and Apollo is huge plus the burden of free hosting could be too much (which it sounds like it was).

Here are some articles that will help you with your own startup.

https://baremetrics.com/blog/freemium-saas-implode
http://blog.trak.io/freemium-vs-free-why-we-ditched-our-free-plan/

4 Likes
131

This is my understanding as well. Although it would be great to have MDG confirm this. If so, it would be worth retroactively updating the blog post and thread topic.

1 Like
132

I don’t thing it’s a good solution. Even if you’ll get some free credits for Galaxy, where will you host database?

133

Memo: Regarding Meteor Free Hosting
To: Meteor Developers Everywhere
From: Fake Geoff Schmidt, CEO MDG

I screwed up and I want to apologize to all our passionate developers, partners and customers. We obviously did not fully think through the impact of our recent announcement on ending support for Meteor.com free hosting.

Therefore, we have modified our plans as follows:

  1. We will keep free hosting on Meteor.com available “as is” through June 10, 2016. This will give everyone 90 days to transition their hosted apps and websites to either Galaxy or another hosting provider of your choice. See our guide on how to transition your application and MongoDB.

  2. We will offer a limited, free hosting Galaxy solution for all our key developer partners and teaching partners. Details on this new plan will be communicated to all of you within two weeks. The goal of this plan is to offer all our package developers a place to freely host their example Meteor apps and package sites and to make it easy for people spreading the word on the benefits of developing modern apps with Meteor through teaching, meetups and free tutorials.

In the meantime, you can send us an email to partnerhosting@meteor.com with links to your Meteor.com sites that you think should be eligible for this new free Galaxy hosting.

  1. We will continue to investigate making a non-restricted, limited, free tier available on Galaxy. I can not promise a timeframe for this solution, but we will do our best to honor our original communications in this regard.

Please feel free to contact me directly with any questions or concerns at fakegeoffschmidt@meteor.com and I hope this gets us back on track with supporting our most important constituency, all of you as our passionate developers.

Humbly yours,

Fake Geoff Schmidt, CEO MDG

17 Likes
134

I was under the impression for some reason that Developer edition uses spot instances. Is that not the case?

135

mLab Free Sandbox (used to be MongLab).

136

I agree. Packages demos should have a dedicated free tier, only for them. Indeed they benefit all.

2 Likes
137

They got rid of concept of having limited functionality spot instances "… we’ve unified the flexibility of utility pricing with every Galaxy feature into a single product that scales with your app and business needs.

1 Like
138

I just leave it here.
Quick and simple redirect guide. Found somewhere. For me it’s handy…

1). $ meteor create redirect-app
2). remove all files, leave just .meteor folder
3). create server.js file
4). paste the code:

REDIRECT_URL = 'http://i-want-my-app-here-now.com';

WebApp.connectHandlers
  .use(function(req, res, next) {
    var location = REDIRECT_URL;
    res.writeHead(301, {'Location': location});
    res.end();
  });

5). $ meteor deploy my-current-app.meteor.com

5 Likes
139

I do welcome paid service because that means more ‘for-profit’ Meteor projects will be born.

However, as I am only checking out Meteor I am already stuck at MongoDB deployment stage.

  1. I have subscribed for Galaxy.
  2. I have subscribed for MLab.

Now MLab asks me: Provide URI for a cloud-accessible MongoDB

I really expected it to be that simple as:

meteor deploy myproject

(with config pointing to mLab)

or

meteor deploy myproject --dataprovider=mLab

As I suspect it is not a matter of weeks of months to make that easy it would be great to have Meteor To-Do Tutorial have clear Step 13 - Deployment. Meteor Guide talks about Deployment but it does not provide example of pushing database to cloud and connecting it with Galaxy either.

At the moment

https://galaxy.meteor.com/help/deploying-to-galaxy does not work for Windows and meteortips.com and other tutorials like http://meteortips.com/deployment-tutorial/galaxy/ are empty

Hopefully educational resources will catch up with the pace of change soon.

Update: I have taken Windows advice from Galaxy deployment DEPLOY_HOSTNAME is not recognized but my login/pass do not work. Maybe it is related to the fact that I am registered as part of organization?

2 Likes
140

If “it’s never go away” refers to deploy and not the free tier, then this is about as poorly worded as the Second Amendment. But surely I’m not misreading the part in blue too?

944×682 84.2 KB

16 Likes
141

At this point I think we can all agree that MDG pulled a 180 on this one. Is it a permanent 180, who knows. Meteor is really tight lipped about their plans, especially infrastructure plans. While I thoroughly support their decision because I think it is what is best for everyone, they really went about it wrong!

2 Likes
142

I think we’ve seen in the last few months, that MDG has serious communication problems, an example we find in the Blaze/React thread where we’ve waited a long time for an official statement. I’ve just hoped that MDG learned from it and changed it’s communication level, but as we see, this didn’t happen (yet?).

I’m not using the free meteor service, but it is distressing to give all users only 2 weeks. Normally all people in management positions should know, that 2 weeks are ridiculous for a professional company which targets are professionals. What will happen if Galaxy isn’t profitable as expected? Will such users also get only 2 weeks until the service will be closed? If you say no, I think we can’t trust on that answer, because nobody knows, how
reliable MDGs statements are…

3 Likes
143

Completely understandable. When they suggested “it’s never going away” I’m pretty sure they didn’t anticipate such a huge drastic uptake in usage.

If they’re wasting a lot of money on it, for no reason other than showboating, it’s a good thing they removed it. Focus that money elsewhere and improve Meteor itself. We can pay for hosting ourselves.

2 Likes