low cost and alternative DIY hosting instructions

[christhekeele]

Synopsis

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

• October 26, 2022: accounts that have been "inactive for over a year" will start to be deleted (unclear if that entails accounts that have not been deployed in the last year, which would be many nightscout users)
• November 28, 2022: free plans will no longer be available and free dynos will be scaled down; associated databases will be deleted

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
• Render
• Railway

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 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 (Type 1) audited
• Other — Commitment: Founder has expressed interest 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, 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

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]

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]

@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]

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

• what is our preferred recommendation for installing Nightscout #8
• Heroku is phasing out free tier cgm-remote-monitor#7518 (comment)

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]

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.

• T1Pal is already featured prominently alongside every documented reference on how to roll your own no-cost DIY solution, so I assume everyone doing a custom install knows about it.
• It's therefore reasonable to assume that they've decided they cannot afford any "low cost Nightscout" solution, or do not want to pay the cost, and it's those folk affected by the Heroku change.
• So, this conversation is about our documentation for no-cost DIY Nightscout solutions, and honoring the assertion in the docs that "it is possible to run Nightscout for free". (Hence the title, "New DIY free hosting instructions".)

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]

• Consider putting the button for railway in the docs, rather than the README? Add Railway as Deployment Platform cgm-remote-monitor#7319
• Removing the wording as this is causing issues. replace Heroku free tier with Hobby tier #148 - feel free to use this as a base for additional changes?
• Please review concerns outlined by @sulkaharo and myself:
  • total cost of ownership, maintenance, support, and developer resources for 20k - 60k people.
  • the developers cannot control the price of third party servers
  • the developers are already over committed with bug fixes, dependency updates, security responses, and demand for features
  • to our knowledge there are no free servers for "a year of Nightscout," especially for loopers of any stripe who send lots of data to Nightscout. Should the default directions say that Nightscout is free to use for a month, for a year, for a decade? We can't make that promise. Every other platform before Heroku has also retired free compute resources because it's not sustainable.
    I think a series of deploy templates for lots of vendors would be desirable, along with a discussion of the tradeoffs for each tier available. @psonnera has done a great job organizing everything by vendor and I'm sure would accept additional changes to add more vendors.

[psonnera]

@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]

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]

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]

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

[ninelore]

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

[bewest]

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: #149

[psonnera]

@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]

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.