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low cost and alternative DIY hosting instructions #147

Open christhekeele opened 1 year ago

christhekeele commented 1 year ago

Synopsis

Heroku is sunsetting its free plan (more here). Timeline:

Fortunately the DIY instructions guide people to set up their mongo in Atlas, so data loss will not be an issue, but anyone using the free plan who followed the guide will see their DIY installations will just stop working as early as 26-10-2022 and 28-11-2022 at the latest.

We should probably recommend a different hosting provider, provide new DIY free-hosting setup instructions, and ideally a migration guide as well from Heroku to the new recommended provider.

Discussion

There are several alternatives we could establish guidance for. There are many general replacements suggested in the twitter thread, but I'll be focusing on the free plans of 3 of the most popular ones with a UX I see as most suitable to less-technical Nightscout users' needs. More suggestions welcome in further discussion!

Fly.io

Free Plan

Plan Notes Feature | Limits | Notes -- | -- | -- Apps | 2 apps | You can create up to 2 apps full time with one VM each. 2,340 hours per month | Run 2 shared-cpu-1x VMs with 256MB RAM full time with time to spare. 1GB | Provision 1GB of persistent volumes for permanent storage 160GB per month | See outbound data transfer for regional breakdown Unlimited IPv6, 1 IPv4 | Additional IPv4 addresses require a payment method 10 active certificates | Add 10 certificates to your apps
Pros/Cons ### Pros - **Build Support**: Prefers Docker, supports buildpacks which is useful if a technical user has customized their build - **Migration**: Automatic [Heroku migrator](https://fly.io/launch/heroku) service - **Shutoff**: No automatic shut-off - **Free Hours**: More than enough free hours (2,340) per month to run continuously - **Bandwidth**: More than enough bandwith allowances for normal Nightscout usage - **Security**: [SOC2](https://fly.io/docs/about/healthcare/) (Type 1) audited - **Other — Commitment**: Founder has [expressed interest](https://twitter.com/mrkurt/status/1562900112572968960) in finding ways to keep Nightscout deployments free ### Cons - **Deployment**: Requires command-line usage if not using Heroku migrator

Render

Free Plan

Pros/Cons ### Pros - **Free Hours**: Just enough free hours (750) per month to run continuously - **Deployment**: Has a builtin support for deploying from a GH repo w/out command line usage, based on Dockerfile ### Cons - **Build Support**: Prefers Docker over buildpacks, but migration docs require buildpacks? - **Migration**: Has [Heroku migration instructions](https://render.com/docs/migrate-from-heroku), but requires buildpack usage which is not how we build things, requires additional changes to the code in the forked repository - **Shutoff**: 15 minute inactivity spin-down, 30 second spin-up ### Unsure/Neutral - **Bandwidth**: Could not find documented limits - **Security**: Currently getting their first [SOC2 compliance audit](https://twitter.com/anuraggoel/status/1562923329350017026)

Railway

Free Plan

Pros/Cons ### Pros - **Build Support**: Prefers Docker, supports our Procfile - **Deployment**: GH integration prevents CLI usage, based on Dockerfile/Procfile - **Other — DB**: Unlike others, provides hosted mongo deployments, which might be an interesting avenue to explore simplifying setup (probably not free tho) ### Cons - **Migration**: No maintained documentation or services, a few historical blog posts for specific use-cases - **Free Hours**: Less than enough free hours (500) per month to run continuously ### Unsure/Neutral/Notes - **Shutoff**: Could not find documented limits - **Bandwidth**: Could not find documented limits - **Security**: Could not find documentation on SOC2 compliance
JLChamberlain commented 1 year ago

Just did this via fly.io, it's very easy to move from Heroku to them since they have a Heroku migrator. I can see the config vars (called "Secrets" on fly) are hashed. Looking at their docs I'm assuming you can only alter these configurations with Flyctl (command line utility) and are unable to view current settings as plain text?

christhekeele commented 1 year ago

@JLChamberlain: Looking at their docs I'm assuming you can only alter these configurations with Flyctl (command line utility) and are unable to view current settings as plain text?

Correct, you can neither view nor modify them—additionally, you can't deploy a fresh installation without the CLI, only the heroku migrator works around this.

So probably best-in-class for helping keep people's installation working come November, but maybe not the right choice for a fresh-setup recommendation.

bewest commented 1 year ago

Low cost Nightscout can be a great way to get started with reduced risk.

T1Pal has also proposed ways to ensure that people use Nightscout do not experience the cost, is run by community members, and has committed resources to the Nightscout community. NS10BE is also run by a community member out of Germany. Both of these are great options for the long term quality and sustainability of Nightscout across a broad basis. Both of these subscription services eliminate time spent by volunteers answering common questions about setting up "strings" and other technology issues. For those looking for the lowest cost, I think Digital Ocean $5 platform as a service would be a good fit, along with setting up a variety of sidecars, so long as there are good documents that don't increase burden on the support community. A $5 digital ocean droplet with some attached volume storage can host Nightscout with all the core application, sidecars, and database for years without any interruption. It's a very reliable, high quality setup, especially for the cost. For those wanting to start for free, something like flyio might be desirable, but it's hard to know if it will increase quality issues or be sustainable without looking at their unit economics. The problem with offering free compute resources is that it tends to attract spammers, among other unsavory content that eventually requires addressing.

T1Pal is willing to work with a non-profit or DAO, or anyone in order to make sure that the Nightscout experience can be cost-free to people who need it, and ways to sponsor subscriptions for third party usage. There are significant challenges, including the human capital needed to manage a program like this full time.

christhekeele commented 1 year ago

Hey @bewest! I don't think this is issue is the time nor place to spread awareness of T1Pal; this topic is about no-cost DIY solutions, not paid solutions nor Nightscout-as-a-service solutions in general.

This person's comment is representative of the sort of use-case the no-cost DIY solution documentation is meant for. If you want to provide documentation on another low-cost solution like Digital Ocean, alongside the existing extensive documentation about T1Pal, I'd say that should be a separate issue.

T1Pal has also proposed ways to ensure that people use Nightscout do not experience the cost...

T1Pal is willing to work with [...] anyone in order to make sure that the Nightscout experience can be cost-free to people who need it

That's excellent news, I was not aware of this. Perhaps in a separate issue/PR we could document the best way to approach T1Pal about a cost-free personal plan, for those who need it and are not able to arrange a custom install?

Anyways, I'd like to stay focused here on coming up with new documentation for a viable no-cost DIY solution.

bewest commented 1 year ago
psonnera commented 1 year ago

@bewest there are already (hidden) pages for more vendors. The latest Heroku move requires a lot of rework and it will be done ASAP. MVS, Docker, NAS and maybe fly.io should land inside. Of course the original Heroku based model will be moved accordingly to the best directions we can find to get users find the solution that matches their needs. We all know free solutions will be too complex for many. But let's see how things go.

dircsem commented 1 year ago

I've found this topic on hacker news, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32599398 and this at github https://github.com/DmitryScaletta/free-heroku-alternatives Hope it helps. Would be too hard to migrate the database to an SQL like postgres, available at fly.io?

JasmineT1D commented 1 year ago

Hi - sorry for the dumb question in advance but are there instructions on how to move from Heroku (since it's no longer free) to a different source for Nightscout? We're running Nightscout in order for my daughter's teacher to be able to track her bg's while she's at school so want to continue to use Nightscout but don't want to have to pay any fees if at all possible. Thank you!

christhekeele commented 1 year ago

@JasmineT1D the simplest way right now would be to try out this migrator service onto fly.io for hosting.

ninelore commented 1 year ago

I migrated to fly.io and it works well. Can recommend so far.

bewest commented 1 year ago

We really need any claim of "it's free" to be more specific about what is free. It's too confusing for people thinking they can expect a year of free Nightscout, when we know that to be false for their use case. There are many people who want an app ready for mission critical workloads. Please consider listing exactly what is free, and the way it compares to a year of Nightscout from the heaviest Nightscout users (FreeAPSX, AAPS, Loop, openaps, IFTTT, tconnect, etc). If it's free for the first week, please say so. If securing the service for a mission critical use happens with a small payment, please say so. I've tried to model this in an example here: https://github.com/nightscout/nightscout.github.io/pull/149

psonnera commented 1 year ago

@bewest please let us try to find solutions that are not involving getting any form of payment in exchange of running our DIY Nightscout sites. Your point is very clear but we don't have enough data yet to understand if heavy users will have to pay or not the services we are evaluating now. If you are definite there is no free Nightscout solution anymore this requires a formal announcement. Please bear in mind there are MANY users not looping and needing Nightscout to share data between devices, most of them in trouble to pay for their sensors. They deserve our efforts too. The only documented method yet is Hobby Heroku and we know it holds as much load as the Free tier. I will add warnings to avoid deluding people.

bewest commented 1 year ago

The pull request adds railway and fly.io to the docs with the appropriate caveats. Please feel free to add how long they are known to work reliably without payment, and additional use cases. It is common and best practice to secure mission critical apps with payment, that is the focus of the pull request, and this is not a change. Any additional claims of "it is free" should filter through the rubric @sulkaharo and I have defined repeatedly in these threads. It will be easy for someone to add details to fly.io or railway examples added in the pull request.

psonnera commented 1 year ago

@bewest the Railway deploy button is nice but can you explain why you've put your referral code? I also understand securing the site is important but should we force new users into doing it? PS: since this is not my main job can you ask that famous "someone" for help?

bewest commented 1 year ago

It's not mine at all, it’s from another pull request. https://github.com/nightscout/cgm-remote-monitor/pull/7319#pullrequestreview-1092775832

Feel free to edit or remove it.

On Wed, Aug 31, 2022 at 10:05 PM Patrick Sonnerat @.***> wrote:

@bewest https://github.com/bewest the Railway deploy button is nice but can you explain why you've put your referral code https://railway.app/changelog/2021-08-27#referrals? I also understand securing the site is important but should we force new users into doing it? PS: since this is not my main job can you ask that famous "someone" for help?

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gigich commented 1 year ago

I agree that we really need to find a way to continue hosting Nightscout for free. I am also sure that is possible. The above comparison of Railway and Fly is great and should be further supplemented. I currently have 4 Nightscout sites deployed:

  1. fly.io: Migrated from Heroku
  2. Railway: New Github deployment
  3. Northflank: New Github deployment
  4. Cyclic: New Github deployment

The first 3 work fine and I suspect the limits should be enough. At Railway you can switch to the development plan, but the resources are probably below the $5 you get as a credit.

I understand that the opportunity is now being taken to migrate customers to T1Pal or 10Be, but users should be shown fairly that there are free alternatives.

Deploying the above providers is at least as easy as Heroku!

I'd rather use a free hosting platform and donate to Nightscout Foundation than pay for hosting.

sulkaharo commented 1 year ago

Given Foundation was mentioned, maybe something to address in these docs is the role of the Foundation... which is an entirely different effort from developing and supporting Nightscout. There's crossover, but maybe it should be more obvious that donating to the Foundation is supporting the Foundation, not the development effort, and doesn't contribute toward anyone getting Nightscout for free in a sustainable manner.

gigich commented 1 year ago

This is a copy of Nightscout-Website: ——————— The Nightscout Foundation exists to encourage and support the creation of open source technology projects that enhance the lives of people with Type 1 Diabetes and those who love them. This includes fundraising, advocacy, and direct software and hardware development. ———————

I do think spending to Foundation would help to develop nightscout source code. I think it is the goal of the foundation, this tool can be used from almost every T1D and these people do not have the ability to run it on themselves on own hardware. So it would be good to suggest a really free provider for running nightscout. Of course this can not be guaranteed for future but even we can do our best to find alternatives if the future will be changed. First there was Azure, as they changed pricing there was Heroku, and now what comes next? At this point it cozld be Northflank, Cyclic or Railway? I‘m sure there is a way to run Nightscout in the future for free for almost all of us.

bewest commented 1 year ago

I've added railway and fly.io examples for people to augment. @gigich can you help put together a pull request to add Northflank and Cyclic? It might not get done without a volunteer like you to sponsor the work.

We've adjusted the wording on the documentation site to clarify expectations. The Nightscout Foundation and subject of sustaining Nightscout are different topics, see the links in the thread for more information. New wording:

There's no simple answer to this. You basically have two options:

  1. DIY Use instructions on this website or your computing skills to create your own installation. Depending on your skill and choice of platform, this can take anywhere from minutes to tens of hours to accomplish. Additionally, you will need to maintain this installation yourself, further adding to the effort. Having said that, there are cloud providers that offer the needed hosting services for free, so your monthly hosting cost can be free - $0 with this option. Historically vast majority of Nightscout users have opted for this choice. Of note, with this option you are the person responsible for ensuring the service is up when you need it. The community aims to support people who choose this option, but this is entirely driven by a voluteer effort and support might not be available when you need it. Additionally, it's important to understand that if you're using a free tier of a hosting service to run Nightscout, your hosting costs are being paid by the hosting provider you're using.
  2. Use a service You can use a hosting provider that does all of this work for you in exchange for a small monthly fee set at a level that mostly just covers the cost of operations to provide this service. There are currently two options available for this (NS10BE and T1Pal), both of which are from active Nightscout community members. If you're a non-technical person, this is a great choice. The Nightscout development community actively supports both of these choices.

Based on years of experience with other platforms, it's not immediately obvious that 500 hours a month on these platforms is sufficient for consistent and reliable Nightscout for a year for 10,000+ loopers. Heroku offered 1,000 hours, and we still had a variety of issues documented elsewhere. Please help keep the documentation up to date with pull requests as new information comes in.

gigich commented 1 year ago

Hi @bewest Yes of course I can do that. I see already a documentation from @psonnera, but the images are not visible. I can review this. At the moment I have migrated my productive loop-nightscout with multiple followers to railway developer plan which is still free when not used for more than $5. Until know it looks like this should be enough to run it the whole month. I will try to make a forecast after one week of usage

psonnera commented 1 year ago

@gigich you mean this? https://nightscout.github.io/vendors/railway.app/migrate/

gigicgmtest commented 1 year ago

@psonnera Yes, I think that is great! As soon as I know how much ressources my ns-site is using, I can tell you that probabably dev plan is good enough and free.

gigicgmtest commented 1 year ago

@psonnera I would change this: "The Developer plan should be sufficient for loopers and anyone depending on Nightscout as a mission critical app. Costs will vary depending on your use (We expect the amount to be below or around $5 per month)."

"The Developer plan should be sufficient for loopers and anyone depending on Nightscout as a mission critical app. Costs will vary depending on your use (We expect that the given free credit of $5 per month should be enough, so you do not have to pay anything)."

psonnera commented 1 year ago

@gigicgmtest let's wait until we can verify it. I'm seeing the hours being burned down matching the creation day...

dircsem commented 1 year ago

@gigicgmtest let's wait until we can verify it. I'm seeing the hours being burned down matching the creation day...

It would be nice to describe your scenario of this test, including the devices that you use and how many apps/followers do you have connected at your nightscout. Some people connect happy bob and tidepool to the nightscout it would be nice to see how does that affect the consumption of this plan.

bewest commented 1 year ago

@dircsem Good questions. FWIW, I wouldn't expect those apps to increase consumption too much. @gigicgmtest 500 hours is just under 21 days, and since half the months have 744 hours, it looks like at least $5 will be needed to secure more than 500 hours. The offer is $5 or 500 hours. This is an awkward wording, but it means that $5 is worth MORE than 500 hours, not a $5 credit.

The thing that will impact most people is the storage capacity. MongoDB Atlas offers 500MB for free or 2GB for $9/month. Platform for a service options like Heroku and MongoDB Atlas tend to come at a premium. The most cost effective will be infrastructure as a service options like Digital Ocean or Google Cloud, Oracle, or AWS where people can bundle cheap storage and compute on a single infrastructure. These will be around $6-$10 for both combined storage and compute resources, although several of these may involve use of command line to get set up. FWIW, the dedicated Nightscout as a service options are extremely competitive at these prices.

Developers who are creating new applications like automated dosing system often take the perspective that Nightscout will store all the information that their application knows about. This creates an additional layer for people to observe and audit the behavior of a new and potentially risky application. Developers of these types of applications typically send larger payloads which can substantially increase the storage requirements for those Nightscout instances. For example openaps, AndroidAPS, Loop, and their variants will send substantially more information to Nightscout in case it will be useful to evaluate their behavior. Eg, ~6 years can easily be more than 10GB. Certain usage patterns such as switching profiles will also cause additional data consumption by requiring more storage.

gigich commented 1 year ago

My scenario is the following:

In the first 4 Days I have used $0.2. so my estimate will be a lot below $5. Even there were some deployments during this time. Probably those do not count to the costs

@bewest One Month has 720hours, it would be possible just to have 2 sites configured with 2 accounts and you could switch in middle of month, just keep the same Atlas DB in the backend. If you have your own domain and can manage dns, you also could do a round robin dns entry and it would probably load balance that automatically. But anyway I would say, developer plan with the 5$ free is enough for most of us.

There is not that much data coming in from other apps and it is easy to manage that anyway. The developers of loop are really looking for efficient data storage. There was a period in dev branch where the data consumtion on atlas db was very high, but this is fixed now. My DB is on 55% at the moment and is not much increasing. But yes we have to mange that as well. I think it would be harder when Altas will do such a decision as Heroku did.

I will report further after some more days about the ressource usage, it is to early to be sure it is running like that.

Deploying on Railway, Northflank and Migration to Fly (not updating, or deploying) was much easier than on Heroku. I have an excel sheet with all the variables and there you can just copy/paste all together. Also changing to dev branch or updating the deployment was really smooth.

psonnera commented 1 year ago

@gigich I also start to believe that as it is now Railway is a very good and easy alternative to Heroku. And most probably free tto most users. Do you run with the MongoDB Atlas database or Railway Mongo? Do you see all your loop data and can you run reports in Railway?

gigich commented 1 year ago

Yes with existing atlas db as I used in heroku. I think I see all data and reports are working, but I do not use them often

psonnera commented 1 year ago

Ignore me I was running on a test database. Everything working now. Railway rocks.

ninelore commented 1 year ago

Question is should we recommend and/or guide for railway, fly or both?

psonnera commented 1 year ago

@ninelore I'd recommend Railway

bewest commented 1 year ago

The recommendation will continue to be to secure resources needed for high quality Nightscout experiences. This will often mean paying for hosting to secure 31 days consistently, etc.

On Thu, Sep 8, 2022 at 4:12 AM Ingo Reitz @.***> wrote:

Question is should we recommend and/or guide for railway, fly or both?

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gigicgmtest commented 1 year ago

I think we should wait one or two weeks, until we really see the usage on railway. But I would go for Railway as well at the moment. @bewest The developer plan is not limited for days, and as I see at the moment, I will come to less an $2 in a month, which is free because of the $5 credit. Migration is not that easy as fly, but the maintenance is much easier than on fly. We have great logs, possibility to import variables, auto deployment, own domain names with certificates. I am using nightscout several years and for me it was always a project which was free of any charges. I think we should keep on that track and give all the others the possibility to run it for free. Those who do not want to setup on their own they can buy an additional service like T1Pal, but there is another way too.

ninelore commented 1 year ago

I think fly still deserves a honorable mention for users where the cli stuff isnt a problem (IT people, developers and so on) tho. Im running on fly for almost 2 weeks now without issues

gigicgmtest commented 1 year ago

@ninelore Did you already try to update the nightscout site on fly with CLI? Or changing the branche from master to dev with new deployment? Did you create a new fly-instance or did you migrate with the wizard from heroku?

bewest commented 1 year ago

It's fine for people have their own opinions and best practices. It's also fine for multiple perspectives or conflicting best practices to appear in the official docs. The presence of a potentially free web host does not change the developer's best practice of securing appropriate resources for mission critical use. This is the correct solution for avoiding many of the issues we see crop up on social media. If the documentation is going to mention that "x is free," it needs to also continue to say that the developers recommend securing resources for consistency, accountability, and reliability. There is already a large feature list that requires our undivided attention and we cannot control the price of servers. I have personally paid for my servers since 2014; there is a large cohort where this is the default behavior, and it is sometimes surprising how controversial this can be for people. There is no evidence to believe that "most" users use the free resources forever, regardless of their availability or accessibility. https://twitter.com/jbwittmer/status/1562970713191239680

bewest commented 1 year ago

FWIW, if I had not created T1Pal to create a simpler, better, sustainable experience, I would prefer Digital Ocean. $6-$7/month provides years of high quality Nightscout. @sulkaharo has patches to enable this for more people available for 15.0.0. So long as Railway usage is tied to MongoDB Atlas free tier storage recommendations, it will be hard for the developers to recommend.

ninelore commented 1 year ago

@ninelore Did you already try to update the nightscout site on fly with CLI? Or changing the branche from master to dev with new deployment? Did you create a new fly-instance or did you migrate with the wizard from heroku?

Ive tried both migrate and new instance now and i think new app is the better choice due to some breaking pitfalls encountered after trying to update the migrated instance or changing branch. Its also cleaner as migrate turns all env's into secrets on the fly side. More details on demand tomorrow.

psonnera commented 1 year ago

@ninelore consider writing down and sharing basic deploy and update information to make documentation release faster. Please share a document or (better) PR this document with basic text step, (bonus) or add pictures in the img subfolder. Thanks! https://github.com/nightscout/nightscout.github.io/blob/source/docs/vendors/fly.io/new_user.md

Nightfoxy commented 1 year ago

The updates to the documentation are looking good. I like the tables you have created.

I think a list of features and limitations is likely needed.

For example, T1Pal does not support remote carbs/bolus. It, for a long time, did not support remote overrides. That also means new features may not be supported in the future. So, it is a curated version of NS.

While the T1Pal site indicates there is no storage limit and the same message was communicated in early advertising, I'm seeing postings of storage limits per site. What are the limits of the other sites, by comparison?

Also, while is only applies to those of us who want to live a little on the edge with early testing, but not necessarily develop, I don't know if any of the paid site services from our lovely community members allow for deployment of specific NS branches. Without that, there will be fewer people to test new features against live data between development and release.

Can anyone think of other info people may need to see?

bewest commented 1 year ago

@Nightfoxy thanks for the feedback and contributions. Regarding remote carbs and remote bolus, if you are referring to Loop, these features are not yet released. People participating in development processes will generally need to run development rigs. Railway or similar would be idea for this for development purposes. It is true T1Pal offers a curated experience in order to support regulatory registrations, feedback is welcome on communicating this effectively.

Regarding storage limits, this is new information across the board. MongoDB offers 500MB for free, and then 2GB for $9. This is actually the reason for T1Pal recently specifying 2GB. If this kind of thing is important to you, T1Pal performs no actual enforcement of db quotas, but saying it's unlimited doesn't make sense, so we picked the cheapest limit available for comparison. 2GB represents more than a year of looping, even for users who cause heavier storage usage via profile switching. I think NS10BE has no enforced quota, either, so 2GB seems reasonable. I don't think there are any Nightscout instances larger than 15GB. GMail has always charged for extra storage, but also gives more storage in the free quota every year. Now that it's become an issue, I'll probably start paying for it, rather than deleting my old emails. 500MB is harder to characterize because it depends so much on the usage patterns associated with Nightscout.

I like the idea of discussing additional features and related services. I believe NS10BE allows selecting between released versions of Nightscout. I suspect that if you want to run a dev branch, you should be enrolled in one of the testing programs available from the vendors, or running a DIY site for development.

The combination of "storage" + "compute" is one of the reasons the dedicated Nightscout vendors are so attractive. Using large scale public infrastructure, they are passing savings on to the community. The difference in price between T1Pal and NS10BE has to do with budgetary commitments for staff, legal and regulatory support.

bewest commented 1 year ago

@Nightfoxy, FWIW, in your case I think Digital Ocean might be a good fit for you. It will be about $6/month for one $5/month compute "droplet" plus enough storage for multiple years for a minor amount ($10/100GB) cheaper than railway). Both the mongodb and the Nightscout server will all run on the same droplet. Digital Ocean has a new way to offer buttons that we are in the middle of preparing to make this easier. Both myself and Sulka have used Digital Ocean for longer than any other platform. For anyone who wants a full-time, low-cost, mission critical, DIY Nightscout, this will probably be our recommendation. For you, you'll be able to easily switch your version of Nightscout to anything, including any development branch, without sacrificing anything.

gigich commented 1 year ago

Can we please change the discussion to Railway developper plan instead of free plan? It is still free and gives enough ressources for running nightscout. Like before on Heroku.

bewest commented 1 year ago

@gigich There is a discussion specific to railway over here: https://github.com/nightscout/nightscout.github.io/issues/152, hope this helps.

gigich commented 1 year ago

In the Cons of Railway there is:

Free Hours: Less than enough free hours (500) per month to run continuously

But in Developper Plan this limit is gone. And it is free for first $5, which will be enough for all nightscout instances.

xannasavin commented 1 year ago

I also tried the fly.io heroku migrator and this works like a charm!

However, since I did not update anything in xDrip and fly.io receives the latest information I have the feeling they still are connected to the Heroku DB?! Also der seems to be no Github integration like on Heroku, so it looks like you need to push from Github side instead of having the service watching the repo?! It would be highly appreciated to have some "post migrate" steps for dummies available. I have no experience at all with command line or such and I'm currently pretty lost in what to do. From that point of view Heroku was perfect as service requiring no technical knowledge...

Since T1Pal and NS10BE are both payed services with prices higher then the low tier of Heroku I don't see myself switching to them. NS10BE as a managed service won't allow code changes I guess, and since I did some tweaks on the clockface (a darkmode for the night e.g.) that won't be an option.

gigich commented 1 year ago

You have to disconnect heroku from fly. Otherwise it will sync the variables all the time. or jusr migrate to Railway, there you have it easier and still free: https://nightscout.github.io/vendors/railway/migration/

ninelore commented 1 year ago

We have decided to discourage the Migrator because it will cause big issues as soon as you try to change variables or update nightscout. See #153 for more information.

xannasavin commented 1 year ago

switching to railway was even easier with that guide - thanks a lot! "free" seems to be a bit misleading here I guess? You have 500hrs that will not be enough for one month. This is also mentioned in the very beginning of the guide -> Switching to a developer plan is necesary. The question is how much you pay for the remaining 200-300hrs? Or is there another option? I did not understand this sentence:

You can migrate from Heroku to Railway and keep your Nightscout site for free (maintaining your MongoDB Atlas database) by subscribing to a Developer plan.

Maybe some more information on this would be awesome as addition to the very comprehensive and detailed guide :)

I have a very basic usage use case, I upload via xDrip and display the app permanently on an iPhone. No looping or other crazy stuff.