Using Heroku free tier for rails production low traffic website

Question

I've a rails application which I am expecting to be low traffic, it is working fine on heroku free tier as of now.

Can I use Heroku free tier with my custom domain as my production environment? As of now I see 750 dyno hours will be fine for my website to work continuously but I want to know if there are any drawback of using free tier for production website.

For uploads I am already using amazon S3.

Thanks,

Answer 1

Yes, you can use custom domain for your production env on Heroku.

Heroku has database rows limitation for free tier; it takes away the INSERT privilege, if that limit is crossed and offers you to buy atleast basic (9$/month) database plan (10 million rows).
My service was shut down for same reason a while back; I got following email from them:

The database HEROKU_[hidden] on Heroku app [hidden] has exceeded its allocated storage capacity. Immediate action is required.

The database contains 129,970 rows, exceeding the Dev plan limit of 10,000. INSERT privileges to the database will be automatically revoked in 7 days. This will cause service failures in most applications dependent on this database.

To avoid a disruption to your service, migrate the database to a Basic ($9/month) or Production plan:

Heroku free service is totally awesome for light production. Upgrade the performance by buying adequate dynos and database. You may need them when there are more incoming requests that they are getting queued up; consequently leading to occasional timeouts. John sufficiently answers when you may need more dynos here - https://stackoverflow.com/a/8428998/1376448

You will totally love it!