I’m using Google Cloud to host my web applications although that wasn’t my first choice for web hosting. Allow me to explain how I got to this point.
August 2022
I’m on Twitter, like usual, and I see Heroku trending. This interests me because I use the Platform-as-a-Service to host my web apps for free.
Oh no. Oh…this is not good. There’s a blog post from the CEO called “Heroku’s Next Chapter” and users aren’t happy. I read it and discover the PaaS will remove their free Dynos in November 2022. Oh, I use their free Dynos. What the heck?!
Why is this happening?
Heroku’s CEO, Bob Wise, states the following in the aforementioned blog post: “Our product, engineering, and security teams are spending an extraordinary amount of effort to manage fraud and abuse of the Heroku free product plans. In order to focus our resources on delivering mission-critical capabilities for customers, we will be phasing out our free plan for Heroku Dynos, free plan for Heroku Postgres, and free plan for Heroku Key-Value Store, as well as deleting inactive accounts.”
I go back to Twitter and many people on there think Salesforce forced Heroku into removing the free Dynos so they can make money from their purchase. Salesforce acquired Heroku in 2010. That’s really long ago so I’m not sure if I agree with that theory. Probably the fraud occurring on the free tiers cost the company more money to resolve, which made the free plans too expensive to continue.
I don’t really care about the reason why this is happening because I’m more concerned about this question: What am I going to do? I checked how much the Paid Dynos cost, and at the time they were $7 a month. Because I have to purchase a Dyno for each of my applications I’ll have to pay $21 per month. And these application don’t make any money.
I gotta leave Heroku.
Enter The Search For The Next Provider
I return to Twitter and look for Heroku replacements. It would be great if I can find a provider offering a free tier.
I try out different PaaS, but I don’t like them. Some don’t allow me to use a custom domain name with the free tier. Others are too difficult for me to use, especially since I use Python and Flask.
I give up trying to find a free tier or a free PaaS provider. I decided to pay for a service because I don’t want to end up in the same position later I find myself with Heroku later. Plus, I’m using someone else’s servers, electricity, and staff, so it’s just right to pay for that.
Who do I want to go with now? DigitalOcean? Nah, they’re too expensive. AWS? If I think DigitalOcean is too expensive, AWS is definitely out of my budget!
What about Google Cloud? I used them before for testing out virtual machines and other small things. Hmmm. This looks promising.
Here’s Why I’m Using Google Cloud
The main reason why I’m using Google Cloud for hosting my web apps because I already have a Google account and tried the service.
Another reason was their documentation about how to deploy a Python app on their service. It’s well-written and easy for me to follow.
Next, the monthly cost is low. Really low!
The company does a great job on giving customers an estimated cost of using one or many of their services. For my web apps I use the App Engine. Because my applications don’t use many resources my monthly bill is about $0.10 per month. Yep, you read that right.
The final reason I stay with Google Cloud because I’m a Google employee. I might as well use the service that I help maintain.
That reminds me: Do employees get a discount? I need to check on that.