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Top 5 Ways To Host Your Full-Stack App For Free šŸš€āœØ

Lucas Lima do Nascimento on December 20, 2023

Hello There! First of all, let me give you some context. Up until recently, Heroku had a nice free tier that let you deploy and test...
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Drago

I'm hosting Rails apps on Heroku and Render. Render is a bit cheaper, but I find Heroku's UX way better. I also absolutely love Heroku's CLI tool that lets you do a bunch of things straight from the terminal.

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vincanger

Have you tried Railway's CLI tool!? It's my fav.

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

Heroku's UX is awesome, totally agree with you on that!

If you're hosting a Rails app, maybe try out fly.io! It also has a nice UX with a CLI tool and maybe ends up cheaper!

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Matija Sosic

This is a super helpful overview I've been wanting to write myself for a while. The deployment solutions are quickly coming and going, and it's really hard to keep track of what is the easiest/best solution to deploy your side project for free.

Thanks for writing this Lucas!

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

Thanks for the comment Matija!

Completely agree with you on that! There are so many that is hard to keep track of hahah!

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Peter Witham

This is a fantastic list and explanation of each. Thank you. I use Netlify for its simplicity. I have not heard of some of the ones on your list, and I will check them out.

And I just had to give WASP a star to say thanks, and I'll also be looking at that.

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

Thanks a lot for the comment and the star!

Feel free to check them all out and I'm sure you'll find some good services to add to your arsenal!

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Boris Martinovic

Really cool overview of all platforms! Visual recap at the end is very helpful for understanding everything on a glance.

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

Thanks for the comment, @martinovicdev!

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Brielle Aria

Great insights! Hosting is a critical aspect of deploying a full-stack app, and your top 5 ways make it much easier for developers, especially those on a budget. šŸ’»āœØ For those looking to delve deeper into full-stack development, can check this comprehensive guide on Full Stack Development Company quite helpful. It covers a range of topics and could be a valuable resource for anyone navigating the intricacies of building and hosting full-stack applications. Thanks for sharing these free hosting options!

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

Thanks for the comment @brielleariaa! That guide looks nice! I'll make sure to check it later šŸ‘

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nightwolfdev • Edited

I like what I've seen so far with Supabase as a backend option. It has a great free tier too.

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

Excelent mention @nightwolfdev!

I personally have not used it, but since you mentioned that it has a nice free tier, I'll probably check it out later!

Thanks a lot for the comment!

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Petar Cvitanović

Thanks for the list! So far, I used only Heroku and Render, but I might look into other alternatives from now on

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

Nice! Sometimes a little infrastructure change can make some economy in the long-term!

Thanks for the comment!

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James Murdza

I've used all of these and others! In my experience, the main differences are 1) user interface 2) robustness of the platform, or how likely it is to deploy a random project without errors. Considering these, I've found Netlify (for static websites) and Render (for virtual servers) to be the best overall!

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

Perfecly said @jamesmurdza! Render and Netlify are both great solutions, so excelent choices!

Thanks for the comment!

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Vedran p

tnx for the info, I am currently in the process of deciding where to deploy my app, this helps me a lot.

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

Glad that you found it useful @nardev! Thanks for the comment!

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Pratik

i have created a web app using next.js. mysql, prisma ORM. can i deploy it on Railway

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento • Edited

Nicely done and excelent comment! You'll probably suit yourself with Railway, but, since you're using nextjs, maybe you can also try Vercel!

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Pratik

but vercel gives option for postgreSQL not for MySQL

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento • Edited

Perfectly said! In this case, I was referring for you to have only your front-end in Vercel and your database somewhere else. One excelent idea for MySQL is PlanetScale.

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Pratik

Thanks for the help. i will try this platform.

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Pratik

can i perform CRUD operation in planet scale db

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DoubleFacess • Edited

Hello,
apart netifly and vercel that are a must, im' testing fly.io, and it seems great, with a very good cli and database support...

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

Nice! My experience with fly was insteresting! Their CLI tool is really helpful!

Good luck on your tests and thanks for the comment!

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Marcos Javier GĆ³mez Hollger

I love this useful posts... thanks for your effort and for sharing with us.

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

You're more than welcome! Thanks for the comment!

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Nevo David

I use both Railway and Vercel!
I love it

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

They sure are awesome!

Thanks for the comment!

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Bap

Vercel and Railway are just too freaking good

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Teddy DumƩlƩ

Did you try AWS ? There is a free tier, who is easy to use, including CD (amplify)

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Balogh Botond • Edited

Great post, well structured and summarized!

I just wanted to address Teddy's question about AWS. My experience is that most of the platforms, including AWS, Firebase, and the five mentioned in the article, are free only up to a certain point. For testing purposes and pet projects, they could work well, but in the long term, it's essential to compare each platform's pricing and features according to your specific scenario and use case. Once your application starts scaling, it becomes challenging to avoid the increasing costs associated with its growth.

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

Excellent comment! Totally agree with you on that.

Scalability and pricing is super important when looking into those platforms! AWS is a huge candidate for those but from what I've heard of it, it can be kind of hard to use correctly too.

Thanks for the comment!

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

I personally have not tried AWS yet, the UI kind of scares me a little bit, not gonna lie. But SST and comments like yours might change my take on that! I'll make sure to try it someday!

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zvone187

Oh, this is nice - I only knew of Heroku and Vercel. Thanks šŸ™

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

You're more than welcome, @zvone187 ! Thanks for the comment!

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Prayson Wilfred Daniel

With single pages, I have used Github Pages šŸ«£. Thank you for these awesome walk through.

Coming from ML, I have little knowledge in these waters. Can I ask where does linode or digitalocean fits in?

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

Nice question!

When we firstly drafted this article, we explained a little bit about the difference between Linode/Digital Ocean (IaaS) vs. Vercel, Heroku and those on the list (PaaS).

The basics on this, is that when you get Digital Oceans's services for example, you are getting more control on the Infrastructure side, meaning you are generally getting a machine in which you can SSH on and do your things.

When you are hiring Vercel and other on this list, the Infrastructure layer is abstracted from you, you simply target one repository (or Dockerfile) and the platform deals with resources and infrastructure needed behind the scenes for you.

Of course, those services give you less control over the infrastructure, but simplify the process a lot too!

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Prayson Wilfred Daniel

Thank you for the explanation. It make so much sense. šŸ¤—

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

Glad that it made sense! If you have any other doubts regarding this topic, feel free to comment them!

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Marine

I'm working on a benchmark on hosting Python apps, great to see some alternatives I didn't consider !

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

That's great! Fly.io has built-in django support! If your python apps are on django, it can be a really good experience!

By the way, if you're interested in posting on a comment or a post by itself, I would be interested on checking those benchmarks!

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Deb

Thanks for sharing this awesome post! Many familiar names on this list and good ones too. Have to try Railway. Agree with the others on the list.

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

Nice! Thanks for the comment! Railway is great!

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Anoop B K

That was really helpful. I tried using Netlify to host my frontend project, but I found that Versal is even easier for hosting frontend projects.

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Janene Hamdan

Awesome, I only knew of Vercel and Netlify. Thanks for sharing!

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

Great @janene! Hopefully, some of those platforms are going to show some new deployment possibilities for you!

Thanks for the comment!

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Muhammad Jamshaid

Thanks, for shearing its really helpful

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Lucas Lima do Nascimento

You're more than welcome!

Thanks for the comment!