Easy way to prevent Heroku idling?

Question

In the Heroku free apps the dynos seem to keep idling - my app has very low traffic but it's also not really acceptable in my case that my users have to wait 20+ seconds to spin up a new dyno.

Frankly, with that kind of wait, many will leave before the first page even displays.

So, I have a problem: should I be paying $36 a month to save each user an embarrassingly long 20 seconds when my traffic is in the single-digits per day.

Is there a way around this??

Answer 1

You can install the free New Relic add-on. It has an availability monitor feature that will ping your site twice per minute, thus preventing the dyno from idling.

More or less the same solution as Jesse but maybe more integrated to Heroku... And with a few perks (performance monitoring is just great).

Note: to all those saying it doesn't work: the important part in my answer is "availability monitor". Just installing the addon won't help. You also need to setup the availability monitoring with the URL of your heroku app.