I’d just give it a week or two. If you listen to the MDG guys talking on one of the Transmission podcasts you’ll hear they are doing a lot of work on Galaxy at the moment and I think the plan is to unify all of that with the free hosting. There are issues around Mongo though IIRC, especially around having a huge number of small mongo databases. I think that the intermittent service of late may have been to do with carrying out work that will ultimately get the free tier working better, rather than it being a case of “only the big corporations are interesting to MDG”.
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I need appname.meteor.com to quickly test my frontend when I do changes. Thats what I need it for. Like I wrote I’m hosting my production on Modulus and Compose.
As far as alternatives go (free ones), @jamiter has given the answer already.
Besides, my point is what is free worth if it’s not working? Some sort of communication would be appropriate instead of being silent and giving the impression that MDG doesn’t care about the free tier.
Some companies forget what and who made them big in the first place, so that they go the attention of the VC’s. Just my two cents worth though
Heroku and MongoLab aren’t frameworks, so there is no answer yet. But in your defence, Meteor might be a framework, but of course MDG and Galaxy aren’t. At the moment the free hosting is more part of Meteor then Galaxy, but they are changing that. And then they will have to fully support it. Until then, alternatives might be better. Heroku will do just fine for quickly testing your app.
Yup and luckily MDG doesn’t seem to be one of them. They are moving their free tier to Galaxy, making it better. That is something positive.
Interesting use case. Why isn’t your local setup good enough to test your frontend? Or do you mean others need to give you feedback on your frontend and thus require a public url to check it out?
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Not that it excuses the downtime and caused inconvenience but keep in mind that MDG is spending thousands of dollars every month to support free hosting. https://www.quora.com/How-much-is-Meteor-paying-for-hosting-at-this-early-stage. Since 2012 the number of people hosting their free app grew orders of magnitude. At this point it is probably not worth putting so much money given the demand. The users have a right to complain but in the end of the day they get shared hosting for $0.
I doubt that most apps there are running. They only start up when they are accessed and it’s more for beta testing than anything else. You can’t connect to an external database and other limitations.
Others offer free first months or 15 USD worth of credit. They have costs as well. It’s all booked under Marketing costs.
Anyway, let’s see what happens, hard to argue with die hard Meteor fans
Heroku free tier, which is @jamiter’s answer, is not working 5 hours each day by default. It’s a feature for them, preventing users from hosting production apps. On the other hand, with meteor.com they’re just temporary issues and then it will go back to norm.
But I can recommend Heroku too, it’s a nice service.
You can also chose some Eastern European companies for $2 per month for a service similar to paid Heroku / Digital Ocean / Modulus.
It’s also hard to argue with people who can’t appreciate that they get something for free. All it matters is to complain if there’s a chance too. Honestly, I’d be happy if such people just moved to other hosting solutions. There would be more bandwidth for others.
You don’t seem to get my point about a free product turning into a negative experience. Let me try another example.
You’re walking by a Starbucks and they offer you to try a new free drink, a free sample. You drink and 15 minutes later you have to vomit as the milk they used was old, they didn’t care because hey, it was for free!
Comparing free Meteor hosting problems to vomiting is plainly rude and offensive. But let’s go this way.
If they have old milk, they stop giving out free drinks. So is that what you suggest? That MDG stops serving free hosting at all, because they have temporary issues with it?
Or do you have another solution? Cause for now, all you do is complaining.
I think that’s probably the solution.
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That’s true, I forgot about this line, sorry.
@sashko can we have a moment of your attention here, to address the recent problems with free hosting?
How I see them, they affect only some part of hosted websites. F.e.: http://viewmodel.meteor.com is working for me without problems, but I have constant problems to open http://moggle.meteor.com/boggle.
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Thanks @tomRedox - a company that cares communicates in cases of failures. Even if it’s a free service they offer.
I suggest for MDG to look at https://status.io/
Not communicating is giving the impression that you don’t care. I hope I made my point now clear enough so that we can end the debate. Otherwise let’s change topic and talk about Donald Trump. Seems to light the fire as well 
My app ( mui-starter.meteor.com ) was working fine, but after trying to upload a new version, it also got stuck in an error-loop.
And now, when trying to upload, I get
Error deploying application: Connection error (socket hang up)
Production apps shouldn’t run on the free *.meteor.com, but it is the place to demo apps and solutions for the community. So it is ok to have it run slow, or have the occasional hickup, but 5 days…
Yeah it’s pretty frustrating last couple of days, been trying to use the free version as reference for some of my projects for job interviews, not a good look. Think I’l fork out the $7/month for Heroku… time to upgrade… oh wait, it’s back up again. 
Actually, just looking at galaxy pricing:
Pay only for the amount you use
$0.035/GB/Hour
I’m not sure what GB refers to. Is it data transfer or app storage? if latter does it include db?
Would also appreciate anecdotal monthly cost estimates based on your app hosting experiences.
DB is definitely not included https://www.meteor.com/why-meteor/galaxy-faq#collapse12, you need to get that elsewhere.
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It should be the amount of memory used by your containers.
If your app uses, for example, 512MB of memory and is up all the time it would cost $12.6/month, that is 720h x 0.035 x (1/2)GB
If your app uses either 1GB or 2 containers of 512MB each it’d cost $25.2/month
That’s how I understood Galaxy’s pricing but take that with a salt of grain as I’m not hosting any app on it.
Someone actually hosting his app on Galaxy should confirm or dismiss my calculations.
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That’s exactly how it works. You’ll be billed only for the hours you use. For example, if you have a 1GB container that was running for 100 hours, it will cost 100 * 1 * $0.035 = $3.5
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So if I use only 10 hours in a month it will only cost $0.35? Is there a minimum monthly charge?
That’s right. There is currently no minimum monthly charge.
It’s the same at Modulus. It’s a fair deal, no usage = (almost) no cost