How to temporarily stop activity on a Heroku server to prevent getting billed

Question

I have a Heroku server with about $250.00 worth of monthly addons (due to upgrades Heroku Postgres and Heroku Redis). I'm no longer using the server for the foreseeable future, but would like to be able to boot the server back up at a later date with the same configuration.

Is there a way to temporarily halt all server functionality to prevent myself from getting billed, with the possibility of rebooting the server at a later date?

Answer 1

Well, you can step down the dynos to hobby-dev tier if you've less than 2 process types. Or you can simply shut them down. Just go to https://dashboard.heroku.com/, click on your app and then go to the 'resources' tab to control the dynos.

Stepping down heroku-redis should be easy too. It's anyway temporary storage, that you can restart/scale up later. Also see this

The only sticking point might be your Postgres DB. If it has more than 10,000 rows, you'll have to pay atleast $9 per month, and if you've more than 1Mn rows in the DB, you'll have to pay atleast $50 per month. Many times DBs collect a lot of logs data. You can consider cleaning and compacting the data if that's possible. Or you can take a local Database dump and decommission the DB and when you decide to start the app again upload the DB (this is a bit of an extreme step though, so be doubly sure that you've everything backup up.)