I very recently received an E-mail stating the following:
We would like to inform your that your free PostgreSQL [redacted] in project [redacted] will be moved from AWS region aws-eu-west-1 to DigitalOcean region do-ams on December 18th. There is no action required on your behalf. All service connection details will remain unchanged.
Going forward, you will no longer be able to create free plans on AWS. To learn more about our free offering on DigitalOcean, please take a look at the documentation.
The linked documentation (the exact page linked in the message) states:
Free plans have some limitations, but they can be run indefinitely free of charge. If you need more memory or access to features in the full platform, the free trial may be a better option.
Sorry this situation of mixed information happened. Documentation should be now up to date.
Aiven is moving free service offering from AWS to DigitalOcean. The existing services will be moved on December 18th, so the email was not a fluke. You are able to migrate the service to DigitalOcean yourself before the given date if you wish, but creating new free services to AWS is no longer possible.
And of course, there’s a reason for this: it’s cheaper! Which is perfectly fine, I’m sure we want Aiven to be able to keep the free tier sustainable.
I think the documentation and other promotional text needs updating again, as I thought you could only set up an Asian server in Bangalore, but was pleasantly surprised to see Singapore in the list - this could be make-or-break for someone wanting to try out a co-located service platform (there are probably more hosting already in Singapore).
Likewise, Sydney isn’t mentioned, but having access to Oceania is huge for some!
Oddly, it seems I’m able to migrate a free server from DO to AWS… oh, no, it just looks like you can. Perhaps it’s possible on Hobbyist? Was hoping this was a route if you need a small service in South Africa, Hong Kong, the Middle East or Japan - the latter is relevant to me, as I want to serve Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indonesian users as close as possible, without being in China, and I have a 4GB VPS, while in Singapore I have a 1GB edge node.
My “spidey sense” is that the current level of docs specificity is likely to fall out of date on an ongoing basis as we rebalance things to make free tier sustainable, making updating it a chronic thing we need to pay attention to.
But… would love your feedback on that, because if it’s important to you as a developer to see the full list specified up front, we can just fix the text and revisit again the next time it falls out of date.
To be honest, I’d want to know before I sign up whether I will be able to access a service in a desired location. This may be because I have a need for a service in a particular location, or (perhaps more likely) because that is my home region and I want to be able to try it with reasonably low latency. It’s not just documentation, but part of marketing.
For comparison, GCP is specific about its free-tier locations within its documentation. For AWS it is claimed to be available in all regions, and for Oracle it is offered in all home regions (though actual availability in some is limited, as I found). For Azure the situation is more like Aiven, though you can file a request for enablement with a business case (which I successfully did for South Africa during the pandemic).
Perhaps there is a way to automate such an update based on the internal database; or offer a public page in the console domain listing all nodes, including free plan status, then link to that from the documentation? That’d allow you to demonstrate the wider availability of your paid offerings, too.
If your proposed approach is taken, I’d state “North America” rather than AMER or Americas, as unlike EMEA and APAC, I don’t have a good idea of what AMER means; and “Americas” is (IMO) misleading by itself if South/Latin America is not included (though to be clear the offer is not in itself bad and understandable from a cost perspective - that’s why I based my free Oracle and Azure Cosmos DB services in Saõ Paulo ).
Yep, that makes a ton of sense, thanks so much for the response, and for the competitive analysis data!
Ok, so I’ll “won’t-fix” that one, and make a different PR that fixes the actual problem BUT I absolutely love your idea of a public-facing auto-generated page that simply lists out all of the regions. No idea on “level of effort” / timing on that, but I can do some snooping around and report back.
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