This might have already been discussed but please bear with me.
I’ve noticed this for a while now, replit removed the repl.co free website feature and i still don’t know one solid reason why, can someone enlighten me on this?
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(You can find more information over here on their blog post)
In simple words, Replit was unsatisfied with how their deployed projects were unstable and went to sleep sometimes even though the feature was called “Always On”, so they released deployments. Afterward, some startups began using Deployments to host their projects using Deployments, this led them (Replit) to notice that their “top builders” are moving to the new hosting service. To force encourage others to move to this premium hosting service as well (saying that they want everyone to have the best hosting experience and not the “glitchy, clunky, unstable” Always On offered), they deprecated Always On and repl.co completely, making free hosting absolutely impossible as replit.dev only works when someone’s in the editor and pingers can’t reach the domain.
This isn’t explicitly stated anywhere officially, but I think that this was made only because of the shift of Replit from creating a safe coding community for everyone to building a platform for startups to pay money and host their services on.
Hope this is helpful, please correct me if something is wrong.
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repl.co is not completely gone, as for some reason, they decided to use .co links again, but they have they are basically the same as the .dev links, as they have the same long urls, and cannot be accessed by others unless you are running the repl.
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They are gone, any links that look like a replit.dev link are bugged, and won’t work even when the Repl is running. repl.co links either redirect to the project’s page on Replit now, or their deployed state.
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If someone hosts a website for free on replit, replit loses money.
So, they decided to overhaul their deployment system so that they could remove that, and upgrade the systems, and shift towards more professional development and hosting.
Education and the community is no longer a focus of replit (probably because it is not a great source of money).
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