Last year, I wrote a little about my first experience with AppHarbor building a small prototype website.  The experience was great, and I was excited to see a free PaaS offering for the .NET stack (especially since C# / MVC3 is my primary development platform at work.)

A few months later, I rewrote the site in Rails on Heroku, to get a little more experience with Rails.  Both experiences were similar, both platforms offered the similar features (Web Server, Database, Custom Host Names) for free, the only real difference being platform maturity and server-side technologies.

The beauty of these platforms is that they provide the infrastructure for hobbyists to publish websites for free, with a seamless, future-proof ability to scale.

Yesterday AppHarbor announced a new pricing structure which includes an official free tier called “Canoe.”  One aspect of the pricing that I think caught a lot of people’s attention is this:

If you are happy with the Canoe plan and just need custom hostnames or SNI SSL, those can be added a la carte for $10/month. 

To me, this is rather disappointing.  Most of what I do outside of work is not for profit… I play with new technologies, make small websites for friends, and once in a while I prototype applications for businesses that aren’t ready to make the leap to a paid solution.  If I have a host name to use on one of those projects, it would be nice not to have to pay $120/year to do it…

My two cents, keep custom hostnames free, focus on continuing to build out scalability features, and then target revenue from large companies like heroku.

PS:  I still highly recommend both Heroku and AppHabor!