I worry about this being swarmed by traffic and hugged to death. Since it's popular on HN, I imagine the particular Heroku instance is overwhelmed. I was surprised that it worked when I used it. I guess I'm gonna have to pony up and donate then...
You are correct in that it is somewhat starved of resources. The free Heroku instance that I host is running on the free Heroku dyno (512 MB RAM). I do not have a good caching solution currently, which is why Twitter and Instagram are almost always returning errors now. I suspect a single person is responsible for most of the issues (see GitHub issue #38). It's actually amazing how well it runs considering how much traffic is thrown at it.
At some point I hope to get enough time to implement a caching solution, which should hopefully resolve most of these issues.
