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~~