{"time":1692053344273,"blocks":[{"id":"tI7t3E0F2o","type":"paragraph","data":{"text":"Hosting a front-end application can be very easy and straightforward plus there are a lot of good alternatives e.g Vercel, Netlify, GitHub pages, Cloudflare, firebase etc. And they all work seamlessly. The issues arise when you try to host your backend API. It's a real war of 'it works on my machine (I mean, that's why Docker was invented). These are the 5 ways you can try to reduce the pain of this experience"}},{"id":"AM6HQ4Cxet","type":"header","data":{"text":"1. Railway","level":2}},{"id":"HLhKdccmmQ","type":"paragraph","data":{"text":"Railway makes it very straightforward to deploy Nodejs applications. They also have options to deploy Postgres databases, docker images, redis store, etc."}},{"id":"MJplP5XF4e","type":"paragraph","data":{"text":"They offer a generous $5 in free credits every month on their hobby plan (this lasts about 25 days in a month for a single application). Using Railway has been very good in my experience"}},{"id":"g1m2z3oVJx","type":"header","data":{"text":"2. Heroku","level":2}},{"id":"Gmr-J1XcxH","type":"paragraph","data":{"text":"Every youtube tutorial on Nodejs hosting always uses Heroku and it's no coincidence. They have perhaps the easiest server for beginners. They also offer a wide range of services. "}},{"id":"mKQzTo2S5C","type":"paragraph","data":{"text":"Unfortunately, Heroku stopped their free tier service and their lowest service is worth $5 per month"}},{"id":"I_g6WgSLiG","type":"header","data":{"text":"3. Render","level":2}},{"id":"E8SHKstuDd","type":"paragraph","data":{"text":"This API to this blog is currently hosted on Render. They offer the most generous free tier of up to 750 instance hours per month. Their downside is, the service becomes stale if it is inactive for a while (and this does not take long. Just a few hours of no requests). The consequence of this is some requests can take excessive time to process due to the service going from stale to active."}},{"id":"KVocd9MfQR","type":"paragraph","data":{"text":"In my experience, they have the least `gotchas`. I encountered the least deploy/build errors compared to other services. Consider using it to test your new API but not in a production-based application (at least not in the free tier mode)"}},{"id":"s6YLOguftL","type":"header","data":{"text":"4. Cyclic","level":2}},{"id":"JT5CFslZ6x","type":"paragraph","data":{"text":"Perhaps the newest kid in town. I used Cyclic once. They host virtually everything. From frontend applications to backend APIs to bot. Also, they have totally free usage but are limited to a single application/environment per month."}},{"id":"aKyf6-Bgd0","type":"paragraph","data":{"text":"The issue I had with their service was the lack of customer help/support. This they need to improve because if you run into any issues, you're totally on your own. If you don't, then excellent!!"}},{"id":"sF5kc0sWMZ","type":"header","data":{"text":"5. AWS","level":2}},{"id":"M_KVqdcRsO","type":"paragraph","data":{"text":"This is actually the cheapest of all the services listed above. In truth, most of these other services are just `wrappers` on AWS and of course, they would make a profit so this makes them cost more"}},{"id":"p5VE5Dltmx","type":"paragraph","data":{"text":"The downside of using AWS directly is the number of configurations you have to do Gosh! next-level pain. But once you read the 2000-page docs and practice, you would save some money using them directly"}},{"id":"zpHxZ6ID5C","type":"paragraph","data":{"text":"Well, all I can advise is don't use AWS unless you're a senior dev earning six figures to configure bucket permissions. "}},{"id":"PViB159chP","type":"paragraph","data":{"text":"Update!: The backend of this site has been moved from Render to AWS App Runner. and it was very smooth. I didn't use any tutorials just click, click, click, done. Some services on AWS are not that difficult and App Runner is one of such. I would always use it to deploy my Nodejs APIs going forward"}}],"version":"2.27.2"}

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