Render is a cloud service provider that offers hosting and deployment solutions for applications, websites, databases, and other web services. Similar to platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, and Heroku, Render aims to simplify the deployment and scaling of applications.
Capabilities |
|
---|---|
Segment |
|
Deployment | Cloud / SaaS / Web-Based |
Training | Documentation |
Languages | English |
It took me all of 20 minutes from setting up my Render account to launching my Django app that I already had in Github. I am also impressed by the great features that Render include building pull requests, logging, metrics, and other services like managed databases, static sites, and cron jobs.
Render doesn't have a permanent free tier for managed services like Heroku, but their free trial does not require you to give them payment information which is an excellent policy.
I can rapidly write my Django apps and not have to worry too much about fiddling with infrastructure or unpredictable cloud computing costs.
Fast to create multiple environments, pull request previews, etc. all without managing devops.
The product is still new so it doesn't support everything, but the team is fast and adding new features to fill gaps.
Running multiple environments quickly.
instant access to github, and github branches, easy to setup ci/cd pipeline
not much, probably the one thing I wish was there was a UI to make building the render.yaml easily
I want to setup dbs, react, flask app easily. was also mindblown that I could setup the databse that easily and exactly the format that was needed
Great support, easy to use, fair pricing and robust systems
I a little more pricey than some other hosting option but it the price is fully justified by the excellent support and ease of use.
Building a site for an Indie startup. The site works perfectly and is very fast. The flexible pricing structure is greatly appreciated. The simple and easy to use systems have allowed us to focus on our product instead of technical issues.
Great documentation. Reliable service. Fantastic support.
- Cheaper instances for playground apps - Ability to SSH to instances
Needed a reliable service to host applications. Render's deployment docs made it incredibly easy to deploy my application.
* Easy to set up * You can create private services that aren't exposed to the internet * You can set up Elixir clusters (you can't do this on Heroku) * Reasonably priced * Built in cron jobs are more flexible than Heroku's scheduler options
Render is still a fairly new service, so it doesn't have as many features as Heroku. Especially around some of Heroku's great Postgres services.
We use Render for hosting our web app, including an internal service, API, and React frontend.
Easy integrations and configurations for fast reliable deployment
Currently a new entrant and missing some features but confident they'll get there in time
Super simple deployments I can rely on
Ease of use, especially with deployments & scalability. I can put autoscaling on or optionally scale instances myself from the service settings. Variety of potential services has also proven useful (private services, background workers, cronjobs etc)
As of writing this review, render's PostgreSQL's high availability mode is missing, but I understand it's currently under work. You can deploy a follower node, but it doesn't have automatic failover.
Render is a modern Heroku alternative. It makes reliable deployments & hosting available for everybody. I can personally spend more time coding the product rather than spend time with deployment & hosting.
Excellent IaC support out of the box. It makes configuring monorepo's super. I launched a docker and static site stack in half an hour.
IaC previews with multiple web stacks become paid plan by default.
Previously I was deploying to Google cloudrun and vercel to achieve the same outcomes as render does. Render makes this easier, and supports preview deploys
The speed and free static deploys, and the documentation
$7 per month for services seems slightly high.
I'm looking for very fast deploys and integrations at low cost.
Simple to set up, while having enough configuration available (via infrastructure as code) to satisfy our needs. Tonnes of guides for various tools and frameworks. Feedback driven and super helpful support on Slack 💯
Nothing I dislike, just features that I'd love to see added: audit log for teams, mandatory 2FA for teams, restrictions on who has permission to modify / delete the database, and horizontal database scaling (like on RDS with a cluster of read replicas).
We don't need to touch any complex infrastructure with many levels of abstraction and obscure services. Render gives us a super simple way to deploy our applications so we can focus on building our product, not on messing around with infrastructure
Lot's of value for a relatively low price. Easy to use application. Supports most common ways to deploy apps and services.
While new features are being added and the offering is also quite solid on its own, Render could have more integrations with other systems. Some additional metrics would be nice-to-have.
Deploying and running a Node.js microservice works without issues. I'm happy with the overall performance and availability.
Really easy to deploy my next.js app as a node server. I like that it integrates with Github to automatically deploy PRs and latest merge to the main branch. I also love that it comes with zero downtime deploys on the cheapest instance. Something Heroku does not make available until you pay for the professional-grade servers.
The service is pretty new so the documentation is pretty sparse. Additionally they only have 2 deploy regions, US West and Germany. My database is in a different region (US central) with a different provider so there is some roundtrip latency.
I launched a low traffic next.js site on Vercel to use their easy serverless functions, but the low traffic meant every user was hitting a lambda cold start that was making the app very slow. Moving over to Render and deploying a node app has made my site load faster and saved me money with the lower monthly fee.