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Comment by shafyy | Hacker News Reader

Has somebody used Render and Fly and can comment on the differences? I switched from Herokku to Render, and really like the good UX and docs. Never tried Fly though.

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Render is very good. People seem to prefer us (Fly) if they like using a CLI, and they prefer render if they'd rather have a full in browser experience.

If you're trying all the things, https://railway.app/ is also a good option.

I’m currently looking to move off Heroku, leaning towards Fly but Render and Railway look compelling too. However I’m baffled by Railways pricing, the estimating tool on their pricing page is in fractional units and seems to suggest a “resources used” pricing model. The documentation is completely lacking in what this means. Are they autoscaling constantly, or do I have to manage that. How can a customer have a website, on a container service, where they use 0.3cpu per month but be fully available at all times? My assumption was that I need at least 1cpu/month for a constantly running container, unless that scale too zero with super quick startup. Can someone explain it to me?

(I think I read Fly is planning to add scale to zero to their normal service, they currently have it at the api level with “fly machines”)

The other thing I want is a completely hands off managed DB with point in time restore. None of those three have that yet. Crunchy Data looks perfect but are not “in cloud” with them, only being on AWS/Azure/GCP. If one of those three added that capability in house I would probably just go for it.

My understanding of the 0.x CPU measurement is that you're sharing a single CPU core with other running applications.

It's amazing how many really interesting and deeply thought-out dev platforms are being built right now. We're lucky! Aside from these 3, replit is doing unique things by integrating the development experience from writing code all the way through hosting, and while they don't compete with a full PaaS like fly for hosting complex apps, for smaller services they are better than people realize already.

I would also be remiss not to mention Coherence (withcoherence.com) [I'm a cofounder] where we're trying to deliver some of the same magic as the best in class PaaS's above, but we are running your workloads in your own AWS or GCP account. We're really excited about the potential future of a great developer experience that can be delivered as a service instead of rebuilt over and again by platform teams in-house.

After Heroku, I've tried koyeb, railway and fly.

koyeb was too hard to setup for me. railway easier, but the images were extremely unstable.

fly was easiest to setup, esp. DNS for custom domains and let's encrypt, and works fine with docker images. there's no GitHub app, but the docs for a deploy action were good enough.

Thanks, makes sense!

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