Description

Heroku recently announced that they are going to deprecate free resources (free plan for Heroku Dynos, free plan for Heroku Postgres, etc.). That's a pisser. So, I am hunting round for alternatives. The first one I am looking at is Render. I thought I would create a little React / Node.js app to try out Render.

Conclusions

Some observations.

Good

• I found it very easy to create and deploy this test web service / PostgreSQL database on render.com
• I moved about 7 of my home projects from Heroku to render.com within a week

Less Good

NOTE: the following points relate to the web service free plan and PostgreSQL free trial

• Apps seem to spin down more quickly
• Apps seem to spin up more slowly
• One of my apps feels as though the database part of the app is slower than on Heroku (I should probably gather some hard data though)
• Logging often seems to not work
• There is no command line interface (CLI)

Spin-up Time

The deployed web app takes 30 seconds or so to spin up.

TODO

• Use Create React App to spin up a project
• Add a basic form to allow an input string to be entered which we reverse after clicking a button
• Add a basic Express app to serve out the single page application
• Deploy the web app to Render
• Add tests
• Add server-side logging
• Add Google Analytics
• Move the reversing of the string from client-side to server-side
• Use GitHub Actions to run tests and deploy to Render
• Add a PostgreSQL database to record each request to reverse a string

Links

• Cloud Application Hosting for Developers | Render
  • Render vs Heroku
  • Migrate from Heroku to Render
  • Render Deploy action
• Cloud Application Platform | Heroku
  • Heroku’s Next Chapter
  • Deprecation of Heroku Free Resources