[hiimshort]

Disclosure: I work at Replit

I think most of the confusion here comes from some users not realizing the difference between the previous hosting solution “Always On” and the new one “Deployments”. Always On was a quick way to keep a dev machine running, but was difficult to consider for production use cases since the dev machine was what you were serving from. Deployments decoupled the two and enabled separate machines (including dynamic scaling) to be used for development and production. So now users have on-demand dev machines with our cloud IDE in addition to persistent deployments. There are a lot of benefits from this approach, but it meant that Always On wasn’t as useful.