Heroku is nice. Be nice back.

TL;DR: Heroku is nice enough to give us an awesome free service, but a lot of people are exploiting this free service so that their dynos won't fall asleep. And I don't think thats nice.

I'm starting to notice more and more people writing articles about how to keep their Heroku instances awake.

And that might sound cool to most of you out there, but am I the only one thinking that this might turn into a problem? Believe me, I enjoy free services as much as the next person, but if everyone and their mother is going to be using these small "tricks", "hacks" or "whatevers" to get some extra out of it, things will end badly. Or at least I think it will.

Most developers out there should know that resources cost money (Actually all developers should know this.). And by giving us this free service, heroku is not making any money. In fact, Heroku is loosing a bit of money. So, for them not to just give away all their money, they put the instances to sleep. Keeping the cost as low as possible for them.

Think of it this way. If your friend opens up his fridge for you and says "Hey just grab something to eat". You wouldn't just eat everything. And every time you got back to his house, you wouldn't just open the fridge and eat all his food without asking for permission. Well some of you might, but then you are a bit of an asshole.

And before I keep rambling on, I would like to make clear for the three people that might possibly read this. I want to make clear that I don't work for Heroku or any other company that I might mention in this next part.

I actually do get the point in wanting Heroku's awesome services for free. I'd love to use it myself. But just like in all those articles I have been reading. There is a problem that will affect the website's I would like to host. And that problem is of course. Dyno sleeping and the price of two dynos being around $35. It's just more than I would like to spend on the type of websites I'm hosting. And I'm not about to cheat, just to get that service.

So what other options are there?
NONE! jklmfaoroflmaobbq

Ok now that I got that out of my system….

There are so many cloud services out there that I'm getting anxious just thinking about making a list of them all. So I'm just going to write the names of those that I use.

For work I use www.GreenQloud.com
Great service, I really like them. They are cheap and they are doing some cool environmental stuff. Saving the planet one instance at a time I guess.

For personal things I use www.DigitalOcean.com
Why different then work cloud service? I don't know really. I like their website more I think.

Yes. having a VPS is a little more work to get things up and running, but to me it's worth it. Because It's honest work. (Soooo cheeeeeesy. Kind of regret writing it, but you get my point).
And if you do it once It's going to take less time the next time you do it. And even less time if you create snapshots of your instances.

And also. You could use www.cloud66.com (If you are deploying rails apps)
It's pretty awesome. It does a lot of those boring tasks for you. I won't go into details, but you should check it out if you haven't.
I have been trying Cloud66 with Digital Ocean and It's kind of like heroku. Only cheaper and with more freedom to do whatever you want to do.

Ok this is starting to get a little loose here so I'm going to end it.

Moral of the story:
If you get offered a free service. Accept it and be thankful. Don't exploit it, because one day it may not be offered to you anymore.

I hope you enjoyed reading this. The first internet article of my life!
Thanks.