You must have heard of and used Heroku. They are an amazing cloud hosting company. Their success was and is largely because on the ability to deploy with minimal complexity without much knowledge of setting up a production server. This was a boon to beginner developers who wanted to show case and demo their work. I was one such developer who used Heroku frequently. In September this year I deployed a slightly modified build of Diaspora on Heroku and I scaled it up to use 2 web dynos and a worker dyno. I was playing around with it and I knew that if I scale it down after few hours I wouldn’t incur costs because of the free credit that Heroku offers. But unfortunately I forgot to scale it down and I left it just like that.
Last week I received the credit card bill and I was shocked to see that I was charged $70 (~ Rs. 4300) by Heroku. I was baffled and then I realized that I had scaled up my Diaspora instance and wondered if I had scaled it back down. I opened Heroku’s dashboard and found out that I had failed to scale it down. I was really upset and I checked my account and I saw that I was going to be charged $71 for October as well. I really did not know what to do. 8k for two months for doing nothing is something that is unacceptable. I should have been more careful. I also knew that Heroku would send out an email notifying the usage. I missed that email somehow.
I sat down trying to come up with some explanation to make me feel better 😀 and then the thought of actually contacting Heroku to ask for help struck me. So I opened a support ticket requesting them to help me out. I had not made even a single request to that app and so I had some faith that I would get something out of it. I got a reply from @rhyselsmore saying that the billing team is looking into my issue. At this point the way I looked at Heroku completely changed. It was some hosting company to me before that. All that came to my mind when I thought of was the blue website and the clean and modern dash and the amazing interface to scale your infrastructure and the super awesome CLI tool. But now there was a human touch to it. I realized that Heroku is run by humans and they are awesome people who help those in need! So my confidence rose.
Couple of hours later I got the amazing news from a person called Jen saying that they would cancel the October bill provided I be careful in future. It felt amazing. I was incredibly happy. This maybe something pretty trivial but for me it was quite amazing. Heroku helped me save 4000 rupees and changed the way I look at them and the other amazing tech companies that make the lives of developers enjoyable and comfortable. Kudos to Heroku!
Footy 'n' Tech 