We're looking for great people to join our team! See render.com/careers for all open roles.
I have _many_ tiny-usage projects, I'll say "10" but really many more. The thing is, even if you put their usage (resources, network, disk, etc) together it's still a "small" project equivalent, something that could run (capacity-wise) on a single VPS easily for $20-30/month. But the way Render is structured, even if I get 10 requests/month on each of them, I need to pay that per project. Which adds up quickly when you have many small projects as a hobby.
So I'm wondering if something like what Heroku had where there's a shared pool of 2000 credits that I can use among my projects as they get used by people, and when one of them becomes more popular then I can "upgrade" it to have a proper full-instance for each of its parts while keeping the rest of them in the pool.
If I wasn't so bad at devops, here the equivalent is I'd rent a mid-size VPS and have one folder/project, and I would be able to have them all hosted in that server with a lot of capacity to spare for $20-30/total. The way I have it now, if I wanted to host the same thing with Render, it'd be $250+/month only for my active projects. Heck, I think even my Raspberry Pi would be able to run all of these projects of mine properly (again, capacity-wise, I def love Render for its easiness of use).
I'm hosting a few using portainer and cloudflared on Synology NAS. This way everything is free, I have unlimited HDD and 10GB RAM. I keep running into some small issues and the CPU is terrible, but it works. :) Most of the time... Which is enough for me.
https://github.com/tomwojcik/homeserver-traefik-portainer
You just need to create a stack (in portainer) that has access to the git repo and select the compose file. That's more or less it.
I ultimately went with a large-ish droplet from DO with dokku installed. It’s been great, for the many small sites use case. It doesn’t scale, but that’s fine. When projects get traction the intention is to move them.
Which one has, and is now on AWS. But if we’d been on render I wouldn’t have moved it. I’d just spin up its own db and scale up the processes.
To do a bigger migration such as that I'd need a few days of solid personal work to learn how to do everything, I'll try to do it over the summer holidays, thanks!
Second, have you guys had a chance to revise your hiring pipeline? When I spoke to your recruitment team a bit over a year ago they were asking for 8 straight hours on a zoom call as part of the software engineering interview. I had to drop out of the process because fitting that in was exceptionally difficult. (They did offer to split it into 5 and 3 but I still couldn't fit that in). They remarked they were looking to update that process a bit.
The above aside - I remember thinking everyone I spoke to there was pleasant and enjoyed working there. I was sad to have to drop out.
Best of luck moving forward.
I know this is my entitled Big Tech worker bias, but... surely there should be a lunch break?
8 hours is insane, do you compensate people for this time?
I was very impressed by render when I was investigating hosting platforms, but if I'm being honest I got scared away by the postgres pricing(free for only 90 days: https://render.com/docs/free#free-postgresql-databases).
Question: After some more research, I noticed that even among competitors there aren't really any "always free" options(e.g. even AWS directly only offers 1 year free for RDS). What is it that makes free-tier postgres so uncompetitive in comparison to hosted compute? Is it because dedicated disk is more expensive than shared cores?
https://supabase.com/pricing (not affiliated, but a happy user)
I'd like to give it a shot but I often don't get past HR because I'm in (theoretical) CS and lack "real world experience". Which is lame because the stuff I've done from my trench is amazing (source: trust me, lol).
Anyway, I'm really good on the backend, creating high performance REST APIs, documenting them, etc... and know a great deal of postgres.
I also have a good intuition for what's going to stick or not in the field. I was doing AWS ~15 years ago, back when you had to use an ugly SOAP interface to get things done, but I saw the potential and created the first automated cluster of bioinformatic tools in there. Right now, I'm betting on Rust, WASM, V8 isolates, and everything that has to do w/ lightweight function execution.
If that sounds good for render's mission, I'll be glad to take part in it.
1. Company starts to do X, makes it a wonderful experience
2. Users love it, it's successful
3. Company stop treating users well
4. New company steps into make X a wonderful experience again, with the advantage that the market is pre-validated.
How much of an advantage is it to know that users want what you're creating? Do you have any tips, like ways to reassure people you won't follow the same dynamic as the original company?
I wonder what the ideal time is in a company's arc to start their eventual replacement. Render just raised a series B which probably means they're still many years away from step 3, so it's probably too early. But maybe when they're raising a series C or D, it's time to start thinking about making their replacement.
I feel like Stripe is entering that territory right now. Not that they're worse than alternatives, but they no longer have that "wonderful experience" magic because they've started to turn on the maximize shareholder value engine.
With Render, I'd rather show than tell. As an interesting data point, we've now existed as an independent entity longer than Heroku did, and we're truly just getting started.
I was more asking about the tactics of the situation since it seems really different than the modal "would anyone even want this?" startup. It does seem like "show don't tell" is a good move.
> 100% employer-paid medical coverage and 99% employer-paid dental and vision coverage for you and all your dependents. FSAs available too.
Good luck