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Comment by nreece | Hacker News Reader

Curious to know if anyone's hosting real-world production web apps or APIs on replit, or is it mainly an educational platform?

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Some companies host bots, internal tools, and increasingly micro-services. But primarily side-projects and increasingly early-stage startups (e.g. https://blog.replit.com/blubbr).

One fresh thing is plenty of developers in India are hosting covid support apps on Replit. This particular app has done 1m+ hits in the past 24 hours: https://covid.army/

You can add __repl after any app to get the source: https://covid.army/__repl

This is so cool. I love how Repl.it is making a positive impact by empowering the developers.

How is this different from glitch.me? I am genuinely curious. Looks like a static Next.js app. I am a regular replit user, I want to know if the support of node/deno is complete (it hasn't been really responsive so far).

It’s better, more robust, faster, and more flexible. Bigger user base and network of creators and apps to draw on.

Node support is A* and deno is still experimental.

Speaking of runtime support, any reason why C# is using Mono instead of official cross-platform .NET Core 3.x or the latest .NET 5, and it also looks like ASP.NET is unsupported. Any plans to address these in the near future?

The article mentioned that the blog itself is hosted on a replit, so I guess that's one example.

This seems like it would be great for rapid prototyping.

It's marketed as an IDE so hopefully not (I'm not sure you even could?)

Our marketing so embarrassingly out-of-date right now but yes we have a very robust hosting offering. It's still meant for side-projects and maybe early-stage startups.

I wrote something on what it feels like to host an app from your editor: https://amasad.me/hosting

Unfortunately my experience of replit (is that the correct spelling now?) is that it doesn't work, even for development. I have the simplest create-react-app project [1], and not only does it take 10min to npm install, it then doesn't start (runs out of memory, gets killed). I know frontend development is in a bit of a weird place right now, but if it doesn't work for this...

I last tried it 8 months ago but I get the same thing now. If it takes seconds on GitHub's free CI and fails after 10min on your platform, then I really can't use it.

    The build failed because the process exited too early. This probably means the system ran out of memory or someone called `kill -9` on the process.

[1]: https://github.com/remram44/twitch-vod-sync

Create React App is a crime against computers. It's an absolute resource hog, which maybe is okay for Facebook engineers with $3000 MacBooks, but we can't give that much resources to free users. To use React on Replit you should use Vite. We were on HN just yesterday talking about it, it's an absolute delight: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26972400

If you really want to use CRA on Replit, you should buy the hacker plan for $7/month which also lets you boost select repls and it will then be very usable for you: https://blog.replit.com/boosts

I lol-ed and also like your frank answer. well done.

I guess my real point is that common workloads that work for everyone don't work on your development environment. I could pay for a bigger environment from you, but really this does not make me want to move any workflow to your platform (especially not production deployments!).

Sure, I can try and sell a whole different tool to my team, or accept that they just want to get things done and keep using the current tool that works everywhere but on replit.

I get where you're coming from, and I might take your advice next time I have to do something frontend-related (which hopefully I won't), but also understand that this works fine on most other tools' free tiers. In fact it builds from scratch and publishes to GitHub pages in 50s in GitHub Actions.

That's a world where megacorps and VC-funded fartups are the only thing left, and they can give you lucrative free tires because either they're FU big or they're just burning VC money to lock you in and eventually sell your data or extort the money from you once they've become dominant on the market.

I get where you're coming from; you just want free stuff. Understandable. But also understand that there are people who want to operate and support different kinds of businesses. For example, we might pay a few dollars a month for someone to host a git repo: https://sourcehut.org/pricing/

Offering service actually costs money, and it has to come from somewhere.

This is $7/mo before I even get to try it on real workloads though. There is no trial period or limited setup in which I can evaluate your system on a real (but simple) workload before grabbing my credit card. Surely you can see how that would turn people away...

Yeah, sometimes you have to shell out.

Anything that can run a "real workload" is these days going to be heavily targeted by buttcoin miners and other abuse. Any free trial is ripe for abuse, and it becomes a cat & mouse game to try to identify and stop them before they waste all your resources. Is that fight worth fighting for a small business? Probably not. Yeah, you might lose a stingy few potential would-be customers but that may cost less than the fight. I bet most of these small businesses will be happy to refund your $7 if you try their service, find out that it's not for you, and explain your situation nicely.

Given how spiky a dev environment would seem to be from a CPU perspective, can you pack a large number of free customers on a single very large VM to allow those occasional spikes without requiring a huge investment?

Anyone abusing that free cluster, you boot over to a more constrained and throttled environment.

Appreciate the candor and thanks for the blog post. Clearly an environment like this is the future development.

The most performant MacBook on the market costs $1000, just saying (M1 MacBook Air). You can get one with a larger screen if that’s your thing. But $1000 gets you more than enough to run create react app.

You really shouldn’t slag off people who are working hard to give you something for free. And if you are, at least get your facts straight.

Marketing and positioning definitely needs a push towards robust and scalable hosting.

Integrated environments (browser IDE + CI/CD + serverless hosting) are going to be big for starter apps and quick APIs.

I spent some time reviewing Google Cloud Shell Editor, which has git support (not GitHub yet I guess) and one-click build & deployment to Google Cloud Run, which overall is a powerful integrated environment in itself.

Imo, replit should preemptively focus on improving and highlighting hosting.

You're right -- thanks for the feedback.

Very cool! So, would it be achievable to use Repl to both host and create (eg sort of as a web/code based cms) posts for a Jekyll (or some other ssg) blog, but/and also have the content be git-integrated? Would I just use a guide like this?: https://replit.com/talk/learn/GUIDE-MAKE-A-BLOG-USING-JEKYLL...

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