Now Email

email_11-27-19.md

Yes, I am moving to a different platform. The current plan to is use Elastic Beanstalk on AWS. It likely will be more expensive than Now from Zeit, but it has become increasingly apparent that Zeit does not align with my application needs anymore.

When I first created an account with Zeit a couple years ago, it was like Web Hosting nirvana. With a simple configuration file, I could have free static hosting or 1 instance for a long-lived server. This was fantastic and allowed me to prototype very quickly.

Zeit was using Slack for their support and it made me feel like I was apart of a special community where the developers of the platform really cared. A year ago, Zeit moved to Spectrum to handle support cases which caused a massive feeling of disconnect. There was such an energy barrier to reaching out for support or simply talking with other users of the platform. Slack encouraged the community to work together to solve problems and fostered community discussion. The way that Spectrum has been handled was very much so a customer to staff relationship. Furthermore, in a recent post on Spectrum -- it now appears that Zeit is no longer going to be monitoring Spectrum for support now. This means that it is even disconnected and back to the age of email support! If the goal was to reduce the amount of people asking questions and reaching out for help... good job.

I recently have been having deployment issues with the platform and it has become increasingly unstable:

• Deployments were stuck in "Initializing" mode for hours and never actually resolved.
• Deployments would sometimes fail for "no reason"
• If I deployed multiple things at once under different sub-domains, the auto-aliasing would sometimes get confused and alias the wrong deployment to the wrong alias
• We used to be able to delete deployments from the online interface. That feature no longer exists.

Let's Go Raiding is a game that I am developing as a hobby project. I don't have much traffic and can't really afford much infrastructure. $15 a month was a godsend for my development needs while in the alpha stages. However, I require Web Sockets! The Now V1 platform supports dockerfile which allowed me to deploy a server to hand long-lived connections. The Now V2 platform lacks Web Socket support. AWS has products like API Gateway, AppSync, Elastic Beanstalk, or EC2 directly. All of these can satisfy the need for a gateway server to handle web socket connections and direct traffic to serverless lambdas. The Zeit team has become increasingly aggressive over the last year on pushing people to migrate to V2. In fact, a recent Spectrum post even said that we should be looking towards your competitors as V1 will be sunset shortly.

This is an unfortunate ending to our relationship as I have really enjoyed Now as a platform and even recommended Now to other people numerous times. If you made it this far in my wall of feedback, thanks for at least hearing me out. Hopefully the Zeit team doesn't lose sight of why people liked Now in the first place as they continue to evolve their products.

Thanks,

Stephen Corwin Owner, ScoreWin LLC

response_12-01-19.md

Thanks for your thoughtful feedback. I have relayed all of them to our team.

At ZEIT, we want to make your sites as fast as possible. Unfortunately, we don't see that future side-by-side with containers and servers. Using an express server to deliver a CRA is not a pattern we want to enforce in any way. Not only that, costs for always-on servers and the engineering effort needed to keep them up is something that we see as absurd in an era where we seek automation and less human-driven infrastructure. I hope that addresses why we shifted our business focus like that.

Regarding the support channel, we've observed massive growth in the number of people requesting support on those channels. I too was "born" in a ZEIT slack and created a few business technologies using our tech. However, managing those communities is simply impossible even if we hire more people. Using email and battle-tested tools guarantees a good experience for everybody, including better handling of paid customer's tickets. I have attached a quick peek of our new support form that will be live soon.

About the instability of the platform. Unfortunately Now 1.0 can have some hiccups and this is due to the nature of containers and other aspects of our infrastructure. Now 2.0 is way more stable and resilient across every single metric.

"- If I deployed multiple things at once under different sub-domains, the auto-aliasing would sometimes get confused and alias the wrong deployment to the wrong alias" We would like to investigate that more. Auto alias now alias​ was deprecated due to race conditions.

"- We used to be able to delete deployments from the online interface. That feature no longer exists." We did that because, unfortunately, we had users deleting deployments because they didn't know it costs 0 to keep them around. now rm​ still works for advanced users.

I hope you consider ZEIT Now in the future for your static and serverless needs. Good luck with "Let's Go Raiding", Stephen.

Best Regards, ~ Paulo De Mitri @ ZEIT

Using an express server to deliver a CRA is not a pattern we want to enforce in any way.

fyi, I was not doing this in any way.