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41 Comments

Why Indie Hackers moved from AWS to Render

https://render.com/stories/indie-hackers

We love hosting the Indie Hackers community, and of course all the apps indie hackers have migrated to Render. Developers will always be the touchstone for everything we do, and there's no better community to help us build it than all of you! 🙏

  1. 6

    Awesome landing page. Definitely a seller.

  2. 5

    first off, beautiful product. Love how polished it is.
    I got a question if you don't mind, is this built on top of other cloud providers ?

    1. 6

      Thank you! We use multiple cloud providers under the hood: AWS, Google, Vultr etc. We're also planning to add bare metal servers to the mix soon.

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        Try Nutanix if you ever plan to move to the private cloud :)
        PS: I work here.

  3. 4

    Interesting product (Render). Wonder if you can answer this or point me toward a relevant doc - is it possible to deploy a background worker app and provision a database like you would via Heroku? And what about a "deploy to render" button like the button Heroku has? Does Render have any kind of 1-click deployment?

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        I was just in the process of writing a comment to ask about a deploy button when I saw this. Thanks!

      2. 1

        Super interesting! I just poked around a bit. I would move in a heartbeat if there were one thing - serverless functions (node / lambda). I've already got code that works on AWS/Netlify for that, but there seems to be no direct support, so I can't jump ship from Netlify, at the moment.

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          You can upvote the serverless feature request to get notified when we roll it out.

  4. 3

    This looks great. I was recently contemplating a move from Digital Ocean to Heroku but I've always been a bit put off by Heroku's pricing. Hadn't heard of Render before. Safe to say I won't be using Heroku.

  5. 3

    How does Render compare to Digital Ocean?

    1. 4

      Digital Ocean is much more management-heavy (and closer to AWS): it forces you to set up your own firewalls, GitHub CI/CD, SSL, logging/monitoring, zero-downtime deploys, pull request previews, and horizontal scaling.

      Render simply works off of your GitHub/GitLab repo: you push to Git and we take care of building and deploying your code.

      1. 1

        Does Render have built-in request logging? # of requests / minute, per status code, etc?

        1. 1

          Not yet, but detailed request metrics are very much on our near term roadmap.

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        So basically PaaS vs. IaaS?

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          Pretty much, but Render also has features missing in traditional Platforms-aaS, like persistent disks and private networking.

  6. 2

    Congratulations on Render @anuragg!

    Can you tell about data security for the persistent disks, is encryption available?

    1. 1

      All Render disk data is encrypted at rest.

  7. 1

    Does anyone have video/tutorial on how to deploy things on render.com
    I am coming straight from SiteGround and don't know any technicalities related to render.com

  8. 1

    Greate stuff bruh. I couldn't find any docs on A/B (Split) Testing. Do you support that or no?

  9. 1

    Do you have any startup credits a la DigitalOcean's Hatch program?

  10. 1

    looks nice! so this is like netlify with a bit more backend stuff? do you provide mongo or just pg?

  11. 1

    Is Render an alternative to Firebase?

  12. 1

    I see many competing static site hosting services that are gaining traction due to the buzz behind the JAMstack ecosystem. I am unable to find any place that compares some of these services like Render vs Netlify vs Vercel. Is there anywhere I can understand why I should use Render, instead of say Vercel.

  13. 1

    Even though Render looks awesome...I would rather have too much power with AWS than just enough. Just my opinion! :)

    1. 1

      It's a very personal decision, especially if you're already comfortable with AWS. The difference is more pronounced for larger teams and companies who would need to hire large devops teams to manage AWS to replicate all the features Render gives you out of the box.

  14. 1

    What's with the pricing? Usually when you move up in requirements and get more resources at once, you expect the cost to be lower. But for Render is the opposite: the more you go up in instance size the more you pay per GB of RAM and CPU. People would be better off getting more smaller instances than getting one bigger one. Why do you prefer this uncommon pricing strategy?

    1. 1

      The pricing is dictated by our own costs. 1 CPU is much more expensive than 1GB RAM; so when you go from 1 CPU/2 GB RAM to 4 CPU/8 GB RAM, the price increase is much higher than if you were simply increasing RAM to 8 (or even 16) GB.

      1. 1
        • Pro plan (2 cpu, 8 gb ram = $85 per month) vs Pro plus (4 cpu, 8gb ram = $175). Although the specs are double, the price is more than double. In this case, the difference is just $5, but with other plans, the differences are bigger.

        • Standard 1 cpu, 2 gb ram = $25 vs Standard plus 1.5 cpu, 3 gb ram = $50 => specs are 1.5x, price is 2x.

        I would expect the progress to be linear based on resources, or even get cheaper the more I commit at once, but in Render's case it's the opposite. That's what I find very strange.

        So the more I grow and use more resources, the more cost ineffective it becomes to keep using Render.

  15. 1

    I’d put your offering close to a mix of netlify and Heroku but a bit cheaper. What’s the main reason to ditch Heroku for you? For an indie hacker that is?

    1. 1

      You can see our take here: Render vs Heroku.

      1. 1

        Ooh I was thinking your $7 was Heroku’s $9 tier. But it’s equivalent to their $25. That’s insane! If I need this kinda hosting again I’ll consider yours.

      2. 1

        I think I like your offerings, might consider it when I'm reading to upgrade Tubda from Heroku's free plan.

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    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

  17. 1

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

    1. 1

      You can see our take here: Render vs Heroku; we don't have a free tier for the backend, but if you're happy on Heroku's free tier there's no reason to switch to Render! Our free tier for static sites is much more generous than Netlify's as of this writing.

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        This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

  19. 3

    This comment was deleted a year ago.

    1. 1

      We do. Here's an example for Laravel Docker:
      https://render.com/docs/deploy-php-laravel-docker

      The example uses Render's managed PostgreSQL, but you can easily spin up a managed MySQL instance using this guide: https://render.com/docs/deploy-mysql

      1. 1

        This comment was deleted a year ago.

        1. 2

          Sorry the docs aren't clearer, but you simply have to copy all the files in this commit to your repo and push it to GitHub. When you create a new web service, Render will do the rest.

          If you run into issues, we're always around in render.com/chat.

          1. 1

            This comment was deleted a year ago.

            1. 2

              Glad you asked! Here's our take on Render vs. Heroku.

              1. 1

                Dang, impressive. How can you afford to do this?

                1. 4

                  Thanks! Heroku charges more because they can, and likely also because they need to support a perpetually free hobby tier for millions of backend apps.

                  Static sites on Render are free, but we don't have a perpetual free tier for the backend. This might change in the future but it would have to align with our own costs.

              2. 5

                This comment was deleted a year ago.

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