Hosting the bot on Heroku will no longer be free

[AlexApps99]

https://blog.heroku.com/next-chapter

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 Data for Redis®, as well as deleting inactive accounts.

Starting October 26, 2022, we will begin deleting inactive accounts and associated storage for accounts that have been inactive for over a year. Starting November 28, 2022, we plan to stop offering free product plans and plan to start shutting down free dynos and data services. We will be sending out a series of email communications to affected users.

We'll need to find a new hosting service by then, since Heroku will no longer be free
@cobalt2727 @SirMangler

[cobalt2727]

Selfhosting using Oracle's free tier would be an option. You can set up one or more cloud VMs completely free forever as long as the total amount of resources stays under 4 cores and 24 GB

https://blogs.oracle.com/developers/post/how-to-set-up-and-run-a-really-powerful-free-minecraft-server-in-the-cloud

[cobalt2727]

How does the current setup work, by the way? I haven't really looked into it much

[AlexApps99]

It's using Heroku, basically whenever a commit is made Heroku will fetch that commit and restart the hosting automatically.
Worth noting that Heroku doesn't have any persistent data storage.

I suspect that the GitHub integration is still broken since the security breach they had earlier in the year, so it probably won't auto update anymore.

[AlexApps99]

We'll need to perform the migration soon.

I've had a look, and I found a service called Railway (pricing info), as well as Oracle's free tier which was mentioned earlier.

I'll wait for comment for a few days, and if I don't hear anything, I'll make up my mind on one of those two and migrate to it.

Alternatively, I'm happy to transfer ownership of this repository and allow you to set up the new hosting (after all, you have a lot more involvement in the server)

[cobalt2727]

I've been stepping back a bit as of recently to focus on other stuff, so @SirMangler might be more interested - plus I'm already using my Oracle free tier for other things...

[terramakes]

i wouldn't mind hosting it if other people are using their free tiers already, i also have a raspberry pi if the bot would ever need to be hosted locally.

[cobalt2727]

Hosting locally doesn't sound very reliable - I would recommend looking into the Oracle thing I mentioned earlier. Plus it's MUCH stronger than a Pi

[AlexApps99]

@cobalt2727 Please can you discuss this with admins to see if anybody is willing to host it?

I am happy to set it up myself, but as I have no involvement in the server anymore, it would probably be more appropriate if someone else stepped up, so they have full control over the hosting.

[AlexApps99]

@cobalt2727 If I don't hear back from you by 26th November at 6pm UTC, I'll assume there are no takers and I'll set it up myself

[cobalt2727]

Sorry about that. I forwarded it to the rest of the mods 5 days ago and I've been waiting on everyone coming to a consensus since I can't host myself.

[cobalt2727]

Current consensus seems to be that we'll just move everything over to a bot that @SirMangler has been hosting for a few months now

[AlexApps99]

In that case, should the bot be hosted in the mean time, or should it go offline while features are migrated

[cobalt2727]

Your call, really - I think the one big thing the other bot is missing right now is wiki commands

[AlexApps99]

If most of the features are on this other bot, there probably isn't much point in migrating.

I'm happy to contribute a wiki search feature to this other bot, if it's open source (send me the link and I'll try to get a PR within the next week)

[cobalt2727]

It's unfortunately not open source yet, we've been bugging him to put it up somewhere sooner rather than later. It's written in... C#, I think