in tech, webhosting

A brief update on Fever/AppFog

Recently, AppFog sent out an email telling us that free accounts will be further restricted in what features and resources they are will receive. This felt like a major issue for me at that time, since I have Fever running on the service and I’ve dedicated close to 1 GB of RAM to the app.

When the changes finally made through, I realized that I was wrong. Upon monitoring my Fever installation during updates, I realized that it doesn’t use more than ~150 MB of RAM at a time. The only other thing is the database size, which is more than 300 MB for me, something which cannot be easily hosted anywhere else.

I ran some numbers and have found that the most basic paid plan from AppFog can allow for 8 Fever installs with 256 MB each but with the restriction of 200 MB of database storage per install for $2.5/mo. So, if you can find 7 other people who don’t have more than, say, 300 feeds in their Fever installation, AppFog would be the perfect place for you. It would also be a good way of giving back to the service that has supported free Fever installs for so long.

To everyone else, I must ask this – tell me about your Fever installs. How much are you paying? How much RAM and db are you using? Would you be open to sharing space with me (and possibly others) to reduce hosting costs?

I love Fever. It’s one of those services that are just the perfect fit, in this case for reading RSS feeds. I’m grateful to Shaun Inman for continuously working on this application, even though it seems that new installs are at an all time low and he’s busy with personal stuff. I am ready to pay for the hosting, but I figure that if we work together, we can reduce our costs greatly.

What do you think?

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  1. Hi.

    I too host my Fever installation on Appfog, and also was initially worried about the restrictions.

    I have two apps running on my free tier, one for Fever and one for cron updating. As you can see in the screen shot, Fever is *not* using many resources for me; just under 100MB of memory and under 10MB of storage. I have perhaps up to 100 subscriptions, but no more than that.

    So I don’t see why you couldn’t just continue to use their free tier. It’s still working great for me.

    Cheers,

    • Hugo, as a matter of fact, I’m still using Fever. I’ve got 400 feeds, so I’ve not kept any space for a cron job, I just leave a tab of Fever open on Chrome on one laptop. That keeps Fever up to date… 🙂