Comment by franciscop | Hacker News Reader

Comment by franciscop | Hacker News Reader

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As far as suggestions go, I moved from Heroku to Render but I'm again looking for an alternative. There was something that Heroku had that I'm strongly missing in Render: shared credits, for projects that have low usage.

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 had the exact same problem with Render, but I wouldn't expect them to handle this situation because I'm guessing it's kind of an edge case? I ended up using a DigitalOcean Droplet + CapRover to do this, and then wrote a giant article detailing all my steps in case that's useful: https://alldjango.com/articles/serve-multiple-django-sites-f....

I don't think that's an edge case. I'm addicted to creating new side projects and I think there's more of 'us'. These projects usually don't get any traction but I like that they work, they are there, accessible globally.

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.

Yep, same situation. Looked into render. I liked what I saw (and spun up a trial). But it was going to be expensive for a bunch of low usage projects.

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.

This sounds exactly like what I should do, the thing is I'm already working fulltime and just have time/energy to maintain those projects, maybe move one over from Heroku to Render (low-friction) over some weekend.

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!

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