Why does my Meteor app shut down repeatedly?

Question

It seems that my app, Evograph shuts down automatically when no clients are present on the site. However, it restarts shortly after someone visits. For example, I routinely notice the it's "down," and upon checking back a few minutes later, everything is functional.

What may be causing this? My site requires sustained hosting - how may I fix it?

Thanks!

Answer 1

This is the normal behaviour on sites hosted by the meteor deploy service. As the service is free at the moment there is no guaranteed SLA (see https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/meteor-talk/HqDvR1sF3-4/YEqrXpDqVGcJ). They typically shut down after a few hours of inactivity, then start right back up after a web request is given.

If your app takes a while to start up, it'll say its down because it misses the timeout it should be up by. Try removing stuff from your apps startup or making the startup more efficient if you don't mind it being killed in the background but having it up as soon as someone visits (without it showing its down)

There isn't much you can do about this. You could wait for meteor to release their commercial solution or use your own hosting provider such as Amazon's EC2 to run your meteor site.