Heroku to delete inactive accounts, shut down free tier

Heroku, Saleforce's platform-as-a-service biz, on Thursday said it will discontinue its free container and database offerings, and will purge inactive accounts because of ongoing abuse. With regard to customers of internet technology companies, it's often said, "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product," a …

[Kevin McMurtrie]

Paying abusers are OK

I complained to Salesforce/Heroku about a prolific SMS scammer with a wide-open database of personal data. I gave them one complaint per SMS. Salesforce blocked my emails.

The customer is still there and I still get the SMS spams. If you've seen scams with 'pingmeta2' in the URL, that's them. Scan the phone number query parameter to download everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Paying abusers are OK

This same 'pingmeta2' spam crew has been hitting us pretty hard, I've been on them as well and getting nowhere from the services that they host on. Namecheap in particular. I would be interested to chat w/ you and hear more re: this if you have a few moments to do so - I'm on twitter @ abyssdomainxprt

[DomDF]

Alternatives?

Any good recommendation for an alternative host for a Python WSGI application? I looked at AWS lambda in the past but it appears to start the app fresh for every single request, which sounds like a bad idea. I could host it myself on a VPS, but I'd like something more managed like Heroku was.

[franky123]

Re: Alternatives?

You can deploy your current repo to mogenius. They have a pretty huge free tier that should fit your needs.

[jimmy-o]

Re: Alternatives?

Pythonanywhere is heartily recommended by one of my customers as a Python-specific PaaS; I am planning on trying out render.com myself.

[werdsmith]

Re: Alternatives?

I use pythonanywhere and I find them to be excellent.

[Tom Chiverton 1]

Re: Alternatives?

Nah, Lambda caches the started application as long as it's in use, or you can buy some reserved always on capacity

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Alternatives?

It might be the devil, but I've just looked at migrating my free Heroku app to a development/free tier on Azure ...

Needed tweaking, but it is mostly working

[The Man Who Fell To Earth]

Ok, i'll bite

How are inactive accounts "abused"?

[Tom Chiverton 1]

Re: Ok, i'll bite

Still serving content, but no longer updated

[Doctor Syntax]

"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product,"

This is a bit out of date. Nowadays you can pay and still be the product.

[J. Cook]

I can confirm, I received one of the emails as I use a dyno to run a translation between a Hubitat-connected button and Amazon to make a specific echo run a timer. Unfortunately, the authors of the code that does that ("Echo Speaks") doesn't appear to have a means to put this into, say, a Docker container which I could then run from one of my on-prem servers. I did notice a pull request to containerize the thing, I'll have to followup on that.

Not surprising considering it's SalesFarce that owns Heroku. Not surprising at all...

[jimmy-o]

Paying customer for many years, but am going to phase out Heroku

Heroku was the first mover, but there are arguably better alternatives out there these days, such as Pythonanywhere or Render. Since I will now be stopped from using the free tier for backup services, prototyping, and staging, I’m going to start migrating my projects elsewhere.

[Claptrap314]

Way to go Salesforce!

You broke Postgres restore functionality on 8/1 to deal with a minor security issue. TO THIS DAY, the issue is neither fixed nor acknowledged on status.heroku.com. So my choices are free, which doesn't do restores, or paid, which doesn't do restores. Except free is going away...

A third option is coming to mind...

[Anonymous Coward]

Deletion of customer db

Heroku just removes the db without me knowing they where going to... The website i host just runs so i don’t feel the need of loging in every month.

The morning of 9 december i got an email saying restart of dyno failed. Nice when you are on holiday on the edge of the jungle with only your mobile and some creapy restaurant wifi.

Took 2 days for support to correct the issue even with me adding a new paid db in my account, what a service!