Who is building on Render?
Just found out about them and it looks like the perfect service for running side projects.
Almost everytime I have an idea I need to setup a database, backend servers and a SPA. I've always been confused something like that doesn't exist, but maybe it has all along?
Currently I'm using AWS for everything with Elastic Beanstalk, RDS and S3 + Cloudfront, but if people have good things to say about it I'll switch one of my projects over there.
You're reading this on a server hosted on Render!
https://render.com/stories/indie-hackers
Haha I didn't realise, cool!
I just launched a little side project on Render to kick the tires myself. It's very compelling from a price standpoint compared to other PaaS's like Heroku, and from a simplicity standpoint compared to "bare metal" AWS.
My initial review after about 2 weeks: it's good enough to keep me on board. It's not as polished as Heroku, but the cost savings makes it worth it for side projects that need more than the free tier. I've only emailed their support once, and they replied within 24 hours. Their documentation leaves a lot to be desired though.
DigitalOcean just launched their own PaaS that's also competitively priced: https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/introducing-digitalocean-app-platform-reimagining-paas-to-make-it-simpler-for-you-to-build-deploy-and-scale-apps/. I haven't tried it yet myself, but worth considering in this discussion.
Cheers, sounds alright, might check it out for the next project. Too many products to try out these days
If you want to save even more money, consider setting up a DigitalOcean droplet with Dokku (a self hosted version of heroku). You can git push you apps directly to the server like heroku and provision postgres, mysql, etc databases for free as well