I recently signed up for the pro version of nitrous.io since they are phasing out the old version that I used for free. So far I am very pleased. Now you get isolated containers to work in with root access. I use the $15/month version that gives you 1G ram and 20G of disk space for a total of two containers. Since I only use nitrous.io for development, I found it easier just use one container (using the entire 1G ram) and cloning the git projects that I am working on. Some of the things that I particularly like are: The editor built into the web based IDE handles just about all programming languages and file types. There is a separate app than can do two things: sync files between your laptop and your container and also forward ports so you can test run apps in the container and use your local web browser. If you don't want to forward ports, you can use their preview option that opens a new browser tab and lets you test in your browser without any port forwarding. The battery o...

I am pleased that Heroku has introduced a new low volume pricing tier. I never felt very comfortable freeloading on their free tier and free tier web apps also timed out leading to longer loading request times. Now for $7/month per app Heroku supports a "hobbyist" mode for lower traffic sites that never get timed out or swapped out. So far I have redeployed three of my low traffic sites to Heroku's new plan, moving them from a dedicated server. They reduced their free tier hosting of a site to only being active just 18 hours a day - in other words: great for testing deployments but not good for hosting sites for free 24/7. I think this is a good move on their part although I did hear some complaints on Hacker News about this. Under this new pricing tier my three low volume sites cost about $21/month to host. Under the old paid plan the cost would have been about $105/month. BTW, I would like to thank everyone who took the survey (or emailed suggestions directly to me) a...