Happy Friday everyone. We have a bunch of goodies and fixes this week to help your projects go smoothly. Including an announcement that will help you keep your deploys online longer!

We got a lot of feedback about our new free plan in the last few days. We realized that we were spending more time explaining it than on the time we implemented it. Good sign to go back to drawing board.

First, let us level with ya. Offering compute on the internet without a Credit Card is hard. When you offer anything for free, people are always waiting at every corner to deploy crypto-miners and much much worse. We don’t like swinging the ban hammer because our arms should be coding, not enforcing rules.

On Railway, we believe in having a sustainable free-plan where students and interested parties can learn how to deploy their code. We introduced the free plan with an exponential back-off to make the free offering less attractive to abusers. However, by making every service count against your hour limit, we swung the restrictions a little too much. 

So next week, pending testing, multiple services will not make your Execution hours deplete faster. 

Layman’s terms: 60 minutes will be 60 minutes. 

Example: If you have 5 services running in parallel, they will all run for 500 hours until your account runs out of hours or credits. 

We want our Trial plan to support students and new developers as much as possible. And this is supported by all the developers who think Railway is nice who upgraded to the developer plan with a credit purchase or with a usage subscription. We do all this in the service that we hope you use us for your next big thing. (Or convincing an already big thing to switch over to us.) Although we can’t offer an unlimited trial we hope that this makes Railway a more attractive option for your hobby workloads.

Our hope is that we can keep these program rules in place, provided we don’t suffer a wave of abuse. We have our fingers crossed.

Holy mackerel! We got a lot of new Rails projects on here! Fun fact, in the last week, we have had more Rails projects deployed now than all of Railway’s history. Django projects are pretty close although we have had already good Python support to begin with.

Now it’s all better. We have added 10+ Ruby, a few Python enhancements to the Nixpacks provider for those moving off Heroku. Keep the feedback coming. 

Oh and Elixir is better too in ways I can’t explain!

One of the most requested features on the platform are automated backups for your DBs. Although it’s on the roadmap, we know that your development needs can’t wait. Faraz authored a guide for you to be able to setup an automated backup with S3 to backup your Railway Postgres instances.

Bumping our reverse proxy up a bit to handle increase load (also please don’t DDoS us)

Updated the Postgres Backup guide with Heroku specific instructions

Fixed an issue where we sent an email to people who deployments were already stood down that their deployments were stood down

Migrated a bunch of templates in time for the template cutover

https://res.cloudinary.com/railway/image/upload/v1662158026/docs/time-fix_aszb3p.png

No Stacking Execution Hours, Better Ruby/Python Support, More Guides

Changelog #0097