Quote: "@Seppuku, I couldn't work out how much Heroku would cost me.
If I run a Wordpress site, how many Dynos would I be using per month? Is it designed for web sites or web apps only?
What would I get with a free account?
What is a Process type?
Is it only active when somebody requests a page? What if 10 people request a page at the same time? Can a Dyno exceed 1.0 per month for a single site?
Their pricing makes no sense and they expect you to understand the technobabble"
From what I understand. They are a container that perform server side requests for you. They are single threaded and will perform 1 request at a time. So how many you need will depend on the performance of your site, the server and how many users you've got. Fortunately Heroku servers are quite responsive. For your scenario, 10 people at once, if it takes 200ms to complete a request then it would take 2 seconds to complete all 10, using 1 Dyno (you get one free). You have some options as to how each dyno performs and queues tasks, but I don't see that being relevant for your scenario, I would imagine cases where there's big load that needs managing and processes to be optimised, maybe like for an e-commerce site processing lots of orders
I grabbed some server data from my site for a point of reference:
I made two GET requests. One will load a "Forum Sections" page and one will load a particular section of the forum (RolePlay). The reason I've done the forum section as it won't just request a page (or "View" as it's listed on the log), it will also make requests to the database. Given Wordpress makes good use of SQL, I figure more relevant.
In this log, you'll see each entry shows "app/web1", which is the Dyno that's performing these tasks. The "Forum Sections" page only took 68ms in total and the "RolePlay" section took 182ms. But I will also say that my site is fairly lightweight as I've coded it off my back using Ruby on Rails. Wordpress I would imagine to be more bloated. But I wouldn't know how well a Wordpress site would perform.
However, to answer another question, it is designed for scalable/dynamic web apps and has them in mind, but you can host a static website without paying any money on Heroku if you wanted. As it is aimed at being dynamic, it is why their pricing is so weird, like with Azure. I can see why it can create a headache, set pricing for storage and bandwidth is less to think about.