Render: Awesome alternative for Heroku
Tags: webdev, node, heroku, discuss
Published: 2022-09-21 17:09:18

**Heroku will stop offering its free tiers this November**, leaving developers to choose other alternatives that don’t quite match up, according to industry experts. But in this article we will discuss something that is similar to our previous favourite cloud application platform — [Render](https://render.com/) and I will provide to you a little guide with Node (but you can use as many as listed on their [docs](https://render.com/docs))

As on their website said, it is *a unified cloud to build and run all your apps and websites with free TLS sertificates, a global CDN, DDoS protection, private networks and auto deploys from Git.*

Their docs have guides on some popular programming languages, such as **Python, Ruby, Go, Node**, etc. There are very easy, cause to run your code with this tool in production is easy too. Here is all the list from their [quickstarts page](https://render.com/docs):

![Quickstarts](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2626/1*KRBXbwnQVwmG0asuMjdlwQ.png)

It is beautiful that you can host not just your **web services** or background workers but also **static sites**, like Create React App or Gatsby. But the main advantage of Render, that you can use it ***for free. ***Of course there are also [paid plans](https://render.com/pricing), starting from 7$ to upper, it depends on which category of service you want to use, with difference in RAM, CPU, SSD and Connection Limit. Static Sites are absolutely free

Also, about how much bandwidth can service use they are writing:
>  Each service is allowed up to 100 GB/month in egress bandwidth (network traffic *sent* by your code). Usage above that is charged at $0.10/GB. Ingress bandwidth (network traffic *received* by your code) is always free.

If you want to add [custom domains](https://render.com/docs/custom-domains), Render is also can bring them to you. It handle TLS certificate creation and renewal (automatic HTTP to HTTPS redirects)

About topic what is better — **Heroku **or **Render **— you can read [this article ](https://render.com/render-vs-heroku-comparison)provided by Render. In my honest opinion, Render is more flexible that Heroku and cheaper, but from another side, if Heroku didn’t cease offering its free tiers, I think I might not know what is Render at all. Share your opinions about it in the comments

## Fast guide of deploying simple web service to Render with Node & Express

So there **five small** **steps **that you need to do if you want to deploy any web service to render, not just with Node, it is just my case

 1. Sign up on [Render](https://render.com/)

 2. Verify your email and create a [Github](https://github.com/) Repository

 3. Go to your [dashboard](https://dashboard.render.com/) and click on ‘**Web Service**’ or any service type that you want

 4. Import your repository or paste public url of repository

 5. Build it filling with build command (**yarn** if you also use Node), branch and root directory

And that’s it. After that you will have to wait for some minutes if you are using free plan, but it is not such important thing. You should get something like that:

![Result](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2494/1*VqmZasICweGx6ekxIGDUMg.png)

Now when you will push any changes to your repository which you imported to Render, it will be updated. Don’t forget to change your environment like on heroku with your variables :)

Share your alternatives for Heroku if you are also going to leave it