I have a website hosted on heroku. Whenever I load it for the first time after awhile (I haven't figured out the exact interval yet, be it days or hours), it takes upwards of 15 seconds to load. Subsequent loads are <1second, even if I clear the cache completely and open it in an incognito tab.
Why might this be? It almost seems like some kind of DNS issue but I haven't really got a clue. I don't know how to troubleshoot something like this. The situation seems to be the same even on other computers at other locations.
Quoting the Heroku docs:
If an app has a free web dyno, and that dyno receives no web traffic in a 30-minute period, it will sleep.
When the dyno receives traffic again, it will take a few seconds to wake up, hence the delay you've experienced.
Note that the Heroku free tier also has a maximum number of dyno hours per month. A sleeping dyno doesn't use any hours, but it does when it's active. When the hours are used up, the dyno won't wake up to incoming traffic.
You can see your remaining quota of dyno hours with:
$ heroku ps -a <app name>
Heroku suggests upgrading to a hobby dyno if your app needs to be permanently accessible. More info on https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/free-dyno-hours