Caffeinate-Server

Keeping Heroku Free Tier Servers Running

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfEFuxpWgHSCAvsU4vxSSamS_i33hFPMWgcck0Z4gAw4ake7A/viewform

Explanation:

Heroku Free Tier servers fall asleep every 30 mins if someone doesn't visit your website. Making it insanely slow. Thus, created a nodejs server to help keep your servers awake.

There definitely are other options I've heard of:

• New Relic Add-On
• Self-Pinging
• Health Checker Monitor Sites

Though I could never get them to work, I thought this solution would just be a bit more straight forward of copy and paste your URL and you are done. Also, health checker monitor sites (which just ping your site every few minutes to make sure it is online) you can't select the time in which it monitors making it so it might burn up your 17 hours, and go dead in random hours without you knowing when it will be dead.

Explanation how to use:

1. Go to the Google Form
2. Type in the Base URL for your website (a heroku website). Has to be a GET route!! ex. https://fakewebsite.herokuapp.com/
3. Check box however many you want for hours that you want the bot to ping your servers! CAREFUL THOUGH, free tiers NEED to sleep for 7 hours a day, so if you go beyond 17 boxes, it probably won't work!

Here is the form below to type in the information: My server basically goes to the Google Sheet, parses it for the servers, and pings the servers every 20 mins

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfEFuxpWgHSCAvsU4vxSSamS_i33hFPMWgcck0Z4gAw4ake7A/viewform

If you want to build your own:

https://youtu.be/MiPpQzW_ya0

Used this video to help me figure out how to pull from Google Sheet API, and attached the index.js code in my Node.js express server as reference.

Didn't include the package-json / my keys.json obviously, lol, but you should easily be able to tell what to npm install just based off my require imports.

The application is so simple:

• Google Form goes to Google Sheet
• My express server goes to google sheet and loops through the column of servers + column of times
• Checks if the current UTC hour is the same as the UTC hours that got checked off
• If so, ping the server

Information on Sleep State

https://blog.heroku.com/app_sleeping_on_heroku

Other Options:

Just found this out! But could always use this service to run free Cron Jobs! https://cron-job.org/en/

Reddit Post I made explaining the history of another service I used to use, other options, and a bit of other tricks to keeping your server alive! :)

https://www.reddit.com/r/Heroku/comments/fyb60t/keeping_free_tier_heroku_servers_alive/