Cyclic has shut down and I am migrating my data to another service

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article on deploying your full-stack application, which you can find

here.

One of the hosting services I discussed was Cyclic. Unfortunately, Cyclic has since shut down. In this article, I'll explore why I believe they closed and share the best alternative I've found for migrating my data to a new platform. Let's dive in! 😉

What is Cyclic?

Cyclic is a popular platform that provided hosting solutions for full-stack web applications specifically for JavaScript application as at the time I deployed my application to their services.

Why did they shut down?

Here is an article I found on their website as to why they are shutting down but I honestly, I think the exact reasons were not disclosed, but here are some potential factors that could have led to Cyclic's decision to cease operations 👇🏽

💸 Financial challenges

Running a hosting platform requires significant infrastructure investments and operational costs.

And I believe that they were not able to get more customers to offset their expenses and this was what they said on their blog 👉🏽 “we were not able to sell enough to make it self sustaining”. And why I am saying this from a good place. I felt they gave just too much for free without striking a proper balance in their pricing tier.

💻 Technical or operational challenges

Maintaining a hosting platform can be technically complex, and issues related to scalability, security, or other operational challenges could have made it increasingly difficult for Cyclic to continue providing reliable services.

🔀 Strategic shift

Companies sometimes pivot their focus or change their business strategy, which could involve discontinuing existing products or services.

While there may be other reasons I haven't mentioned, I believe these three factors contributed to their shutdown.

So this now leads us to 👇🏽

Where am I migrating my data to?

So if you went through the first link of the article you might known already. But nevertheless, I will be migrating my data to the Sanity(sanity.io). So Sanity is a headless CMS (Content management System) which means the content like text, images, videos, etc. is stored separately from the way it's presented on the website. And the cool feature I like about them is that they offer a cloud-hosted option where you don't need to manage your own server infrastructure.

So my full stack website Nike webstore (under maintenance though 😅) was initially built with the MERN stack so you can imagine moving my data from mongoDB to Sanity and I also have to use another method in querying my data.

What I learned from all these?

Besides learning new techniques for migrating data without breaking anything (yet 😅), I also gathered some valuable insights: always strike the right balance between free and paid offerings to incentivize upgrades. Continuously evaluate and adjust pricing models as your product and the market evolve. Focus on converting free users to paying customers through effective strategies. Diversify revenue streams beyond just a freemium model. Consistently improve the product and user experience to justify paid plans. (💡 Just a side note: avoid doing this from your main branch. 😅) 👇🏽

💡 Just to be clear, I really enjoyed Cyclic services because they really made deploying full stack applications very easy which was why I even wrote the article.

Conclusion

Alright guys, that’s the end of the article 🎊🎊. I hope you found it informative, and I would love to hear about better alternatives for migrating your MERN stack app to free web services. Have an amazing weekend, and see you next week! 😃.