AppFog is dropping their free plan

THIS EMAIL CONTAINS IMPORTANT INFORMATION THAT REQUIRES YOUR IMMEDIATE ATTENTION AND
ACTION

Next Wednesday, February 19, we are reducing the size of our free account plans. As
a free account owner, this will impact you.

Our overriding goal is to provide a stable, reliable, and incredibly easy-to-use
PaaS for all of our customers. Over the past few months, a subset of free users have
engaged in abusive actions that has negatively affected the stability and uptime for
all users.

We have taken numerous steps and dedicated resources toward addressing abuse, but
have  come to the realization that larger changes are needed to bring AppFog back to
the level of reliability our customers have every right to expect. We want all
developers to have an opportunity to try our service. We also need to maintain a
level of control over the reliability experienced by our paying customers.

This is going to result in several changes to AppFog’s systems and plans. Our goal
is to make these changes as minimal as possible while still improving the experience
for everyone. To reach these goals, we are making the following  changes:

* New customers will no longer have the option to sign up for a free plan. We will
offer a trial starting very soon.

* Existing users of our free plan will see a modified free plan, with a smaller set
of resources available for your use.
+ 512MB RAM (previously 2GB RAM)
+ 2 app instances (previously limited by available memory)
+ 2 services instances (previously 8 services instances)

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ACTION REQUIRED

A rolling 4-hour maintenance window will begin at 6pm US Pacific Time (UTC-08:00) on
Wednesday, February 19. All applications will be stopped and unavailable during the
maintenance window. You should notify your users of this maintenance period when
applications will be down.

Each infrastructure will come down to begin a 4-hour maintenance period at the
following US Pacific times (with each datacenter’s local time in parentheses):
* AWS-AP - 1pm Wed, Feb 19 US Pacific  (5am Thurs, Feb 20 SGT/GMT+8)
* AWS-EU - 3pm Wed, Feb 19 US Pacific  (11pm Wed, Feb 19 GMT)
* AWS-US - 6pm Wed, Feb 19 US Pacific  (9pm Wed, Feb 19 US ET/GMT-5)
* HP-US - 10pm Wed, Feb 19 US Pacific  (11pm Wed, Feb 19 US MT/GMT-7)

ALL FREE PLAN CUSTOMERS WILL NEED TO RESTART THEIR APPLICATIONS

You will need to login to your AppFog account and restart your applications after
the maintenance is complete.  We will post regular maintenance updates to the
Twitter account @appfogstatus (https://twitter.com/AppFogStatus) and on the
http://status.appfog.com (http://status.appfog.com/) page.

IMPORTANT: WE WILL ALSO BE REMOVING INACTIVE ACCOUNTS

You must login within 14 days (by Wed. March 5). After this date, inactive accounts
not logged into will suspended and the account owner notified. Suspended accounts
with no activity (login) after 30 days (by Fri. Mar 19) will be deleted.
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As a Free Account Owner affected by these changes, you have two options:

1. Upgrade to a paid account (https://console.appfog.com/#plans) before the restart.
Running apps in paid accounts will be automatically restarted.

2. Continue with your free plan account; all apps in free plans will remain stopped
until you restart them. Restart as many as you want, as long as you stay below the
new thresholds outlined above (512MB, 2 app instances, 2 service instances).  If you
have been consuming more than these resource limits, we hope you will consider
upgrading to one of our subscription plans.

Thank you for being an AppFog user and customer. We appreciate our developers and
know that this maintenance could be disruptive for many of our users. These changes
are critical and intended to enable us to focus our resources on the goal of
stability and uptime for all of our customers moving forward.

Sincerely,
The AppFog Team