# How to stop Your Heroku app from sleeping😴 (FREE)

## The Story Behind 📚

Few months back I built a tool called  [richurl.tech](https://richurl.tech) which is like a url shortner 🔗 but with super power ⚡ . When someone clicks on the richurl, it sends them directly to the YouTube app instead of opening videos on FB/Instagram/Linkedin Broswer.

The backend API was deployed on heroku. It's a cloud platform as a service where you can deploy apps built using python, node, Go, and many more. 

If you are on a free tier on Heroku your app sleeps if it is not active for more than 30 minutes. But My back-end should never sleep since it causes delay to wake up the server and defeats the whole purpose of simplifying the user flow through the service. 

Here is how I fixed it 

## Solution ✨

Adding a  credit card on heroku gives you total 1000 hours/month , allows you to deploy more than 5 apps and allows custom domain mapping all for FREE.
### First method
There are many ways on the internet by which you can stop your heroku from sleeping but by far this is the simplest way on the internet.

> Follow this only if you have more than 750hours of dyno time since you won't run out of monthly quota. 



Visit  [Kaffeine Shots](https://kaffeine.herokuapp.com/) and enter your heroku app.
It basically pings your app every 30 minutes once and doesn't make it sleep except for the minimum 6 hours which is mandatory.

![kafeeine shot.JPG](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1619243262087/mb9GleOTX.jpeg)

If you don't want this to continue or running out of quota then you can even stop this.

### Second method

**Hobby Dynos **

Hobby Dynos are same as free dynos but they never sleep by default. 

They cost $7/month but if you are a student like me you can sign up for  [GitHub Students beneifts](https://education.github.com/pack)  and can get free hobby dynos for 2 years . 

Currently I am using Hobby Dynos since I am a student.

--- 

That's it folks. If you have a friend who is a youtuber  . Ask him to try out  [Rich URL](https://richurl.tech)  while sharing his links on social media platform. I am very close to 100 followers on hashnode. Click on Follow :)

I am also available for free lance gigs or Full time offer. You can contact me on  [Twitter](https://twitter.com/HSBTechYt)  or  on [Linkedin](https://www.linkedin.com/in/hrithwik-bharadwaj) 
![hrithwik.jpg](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1599034192769/tdRNTK_i9.jpeg)