Avoid idling in Openshift with UptimeRobot

Yesterday I prepared a presentation for my coworkers comparing two PaaS services, Heroku and OpenShift, and now, an idea has come to my mind.

If this is the first time you’ve heard about a PaaS I would tell you that a PaaS is a platform that abstracts you from all infrastructure needs to host an application and also offers some extras like NodeJS, Python, MongoDB, MySQL, etc. If this explanation is not enough you can read what Tom’s IT wrote about it.

These services usually have free plans where applications are idling if they not receive a request in a period of time, for example:

• Heroku: Idling on 30 minutes of inactivity (6 hours sleeping daily, so bad)
• Openshift: Idling o 24 hours of inactivity (App never sleeps, so good)

Reading above, please migrate your services to Openshift because it has a 24 hours idling and not sleep time on its free plan.

If you want to avoid application idling but you don’t want to hear about paying, (I would recommend you to pay a plan or buy a cheaper host like OVH) you can try UptimeRobot.

UptimeRobot is a free service created to check the uptime of a server, if the server fails it notifies you to the email you have provided. I use this service together with IFTTT to get notifications in my mobile phone when one of my websites is down.

But as I have said, if you don’t want to pay for Heroku or Openshift plan (or others) you can use UptimeRobot to make HTTP requests or other kind of requests to your application hosted on those services and you application will never be idle.