Render is a cloud service provider that offers hosting and deployment solutions for applications, websites, databases, and other web services. Similar to platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, and Heroku, Render aims to simplify the deployment and scaling of applications.
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Deployment | Cloud / SaaS / Web-Based |
Training | Documentation |
Languages | English |
Ease of use is hands down the best thing about Render. The docs are incredibly useful also. The free static websites put them over the top!
Support is all in SF (I think), so if you're in the wrong timezone, it might take a while for them to get back to you. That said, the longest I've waited is 2 hours. Also the docs are excellent so if you pay attention, it's so easy to use the support won't be needed.
Going from development to production can be painful. Updating my apps is as simple as committing to GIT.
The most helpful thing that I found about render was it's "in few clicks deployment" and "easy to use interface". It saves a ton of time that get's wasted in services deployment. Also, Static site deployment is completely free, they don't even ask for a card for that.
I have yet not found any downside about the platform.
I had a backend service that I had to quickly deploy. It was a serious project and involved covid help resources for end users. I had no time to waste configuring systems for deployment.
With Render, whatyou see is what you get. There are no hidden fees, no dark patterns like the big cloud providers to trick you into spending more.
I didn't find support for FastAPI, raised it to them and they were very fast in implementing it.
I am hosting my APIs on Render. It's much easier to get started than on GCP or AWS.
The new auto-scaling support is really great, and deployment/management of databases is ten times easier than Heroku. Another benefit of Render is how active their founder is on Twitter. It's kind of rare in my experience for someone to be so involved in the community, and seeing Anurag on almost every Render post that I've seen espousing the benefits of Render or addressing concerns gives me a lot of confidence in using the product to solve the needs of my business.
The company is still early on, so they aren't on the bleeding edge with Postgres upgrades, Redis support, etc. However, their roadmap looks really promising.
Deploying code to production is hard. I've tried bare metal, Heroku, Digital Ocean Apps Platform, AWS Lightsail, and others. Render makes management and billing easier than any of the rest. I love how active the company is on their roadmap in terms of communicating with stakeholders, which gives me way more confidence than I have at Heroku with Salesforce running the show and not very many updates.
The Static site hosting and Ease of use just like plug and play ! Its like selecting your options and its deployed
Nothing as such Pricing is really good awaiting a longer trial period no dislikes at all
They are solving problems of scalablity and Management of Servers as its Managed by render now
Simple to setup and easy integration with Github workflows. Supports Elixir.
The Support teams don't seem to work in EU hours.
Helps speed up Elixir / Phoenix deployments painlessly.
It's so much more affordably priced and faster than Heroku. I think my project's response time was up to 30-70% faster on Render. And this is up to 70% cheaper than what Heroku offers for the same dyno specs (1GB RAM, etc) The developer experience is also quite pleasant. There's a command line that's very speedy, and somehow much faster than heroku run console CLI
Nothing much but that it's still lacking Pipelines (Continuous Integration) that Heroku offers. And lacking a more vibrant add-on ecosystem, which Heroku has.
Conveniently hosting my projects at a very affordable price. The benefits are that they're much cheaper and faster and the developer experience is almost, if not on par with Heroku.
Render is the most simple platform to create static websites
By now, I dont dislike anything at all in render.
Render helped me to turn the dream of a blog to become reality and I have full control of it in a simple and clean interface. It doesnt charges me for this static blog and gives me the opportunity to point my own domain to the site. The integration is so simple that I just had to authorize'em in my git project and set 2 commands to get a full working continuous deployment pipeline. I'm just amuzed
Straight-forward to use. Out-of-the-box Elixir support.
Small add-ons offer. Constant issues with the build cache.
Bootstrapping a digital product without having to worry too much about infrastructure.
As a full-stack javascript developer coming from Heroku, I'm blown away by ease-of-use and price. The dashboard is dead simple to use, but it still lets my personalize my services and configurations. Deploying is super easy. I have 2 services - a vue app and a node server - hosted on Render, and I paid like $6 last month.
Render is relatively new, so it doesn't support all the same tech that larger hosting providers have. I've had some issues with deploys, but the team helped me get them resolved.
I'm hosting my fronted + backend on render. I needed to deploy everything very quickly (needed to be rolled to production over a weekend), and I was able to get going on Render really quickly.
Coming from Heroku, the first thing I noticed about Render was how everything about deployment seems to "just work". It's such a refreshing experience to be able to follow their documentation, pertaining to your specific deployment, and not have to then scour the internet looking for the actual way to deploy with their service. Further, Render automates your site's HTTPS/SSL (TLS nowadays, hopefully) and integrates with GitHub. They also make restricting external access to your database a breeze — security feels powerful and easy to implement with Render (most of it is handled for you). And, if you have a question, their support staff is informative, kind, and timely. It's truly made deployment feel a lot less like "deployment" and more like... "we're live!"
There really isn't anything I dislike at all. Are there things I'd like to see? Absolutely, and they have a feature request page where you can track all feature requests and make your own. Perhaps one feature, is the ability to manually control the storage time of database logs. By default, Render keeps the logs for approximately 1-week and then they are deleted. This is great from a data policy point of view, but leveraging a finer-grained control over your logs is going to be sought after for most organizations (perhaps you want them deleted after 48 hours?).
Render has made it a breeze for me to rapidly deploy and test in a live staging environment. Further, with the benefits of using Elixir, I can quickly and easily scale by adding additional hardware and resources to both my application service and database service with a few simple clicks of a button.
Tried first App Platform from Digital Ocean, but Render offers more capabilities at a similar price. You can create environment variables that can be shared between multiple services . If you need to, you can even host cron jobs or workers. Another fact that should be mentioned is that the integration with GitHub makes deploying code really easy and the ability to host docker containers offers you a lot of options regarding what kind of service you want to host.
A free database tier would have been great for development environments. Also it would be nice if it would offer support for hosting Java services out of the box, but I guess this can be easily solved by creating a Dockerfile for your Java service.
Render really helps me to focus on what really matters, writing code. Managing DevOps stuff can be pretty hard and usually takes a lot of time so this can really be a game changer.
I used render to create a cron job. It was pretty easy to use, and I got it up and running in 5 minutes.
The cost. It's more expensive than other services for a cron job, but at $4 it's not breaking the bank or anything
I'm solving a twitter bot.
I love the simplicity, linked to GitHub account so the repository discovery is automated and with just a pull i can deploy latest commit. Easy to add env variable to environnement and the console show direct feedback and updating and installing package. Very elegant Dashboard and amazing documentation with predefined template of different stack to use to deploy quick configuration and test.
I don't have a lot of experience for now, i tested Heroku and prefer Render by a large amount. Will comme back to it if i find any flaw.
I'm very new to the Jamstack world and found that render was the most direct (no hidden cost) service for my tinkering and later production environments. Included CDN, Brotli compression, HTTP2 serving and automated SSL are amazing for a dev like me coming from full stack world where i have to manage all services myself. I'm creating a full static e-commerce website with Strapi as a backend (hosted on Render, Node service with persistent Disk) and NuxtJS static e-commerce also served via Render static website.
I really like that Render had pre-configured environments for building a Flask app. Plus, it has deploy hooks for new pushes to Github.
You can't run tests before deploying (or at least I can't figure it out).
We wanted a really simple deploy process that would also make sure that our services kept running smoothly. Render satisfies both!
I love the ease of configuration, specially when it comes to attaching services to each other
nothing really, hoping they continue growing and add extra features like CDN or etc, but for now they do exactly what they promise, and they do it well
I started using render when i needed quick test environments for my application. The benefits were super quick deployment times, and a super quick onboarding process.
Render is very easy to get started with and offers lots of options. Coming from Heroku, I have really liked the option for Environment Variable groups as well as the storage options. The customer support via slack is also really nice as I can chat with a human in real-time without having to create a ticket.
When I need to restart the application or change an environment variable, it requires a full rebuild of my application before becoming live. It would be nice to not require a full rebuild as an option. In addition, my build process consumes a lot of memory and has exceeded a 4GB limit and was terminated without sufficient error messaging to let me know what the problem was and required insight from the support team. Finally, I would love to see more add-ons.
Render provides everything I need to build and deploy web applications without having to worry about my own infrastructure, proxy configurations, linux environments etc.. I have been able to develop and release products more quickly than I would if I had to manage my own infrastructure.
* Super simple deployment. * Quick and easy setup for Ruby on Rails applications. * You don't need to worry about SSL certificates, it's handled by you automatically. * Uptime is impressive. * Documentation is well written. Even beginners don't have a problem with the setup.
* Missing Cloud Object Storage. I would prefer to keep everything in one place but unfortunately, I had to use another provider for that. * Missing ability to SSH into instances. * Pricing for toy projects could be cheaper. To get a working basic Ruby on Rails app you need to pay for one service and one database.
* Ruby on Rails apps deployment * Git automatic deployment
The UX is very pleasant and intuitive. An environment available for each Git branch is also very nice to have for testing purpose. Automatic SSL is great too.
Render is a relatively new service compared to other PaaS so you might encounter obscure edge cases sometimes but the support is very quick to answer.
We want to deploy Elixir/Phoenix applications. Render integrates these natively.
For me, the ability to get almost instant support on Slack or Discourse is super valuable. I can discuss specifics with other Render users even with Render engineers. That's really useful and not a standard at all. Also the fact, that it's rapidly evolving and improving is very promising. All the last tech and features are being implemented.
I would like to have a bit cheaper service tiers available, especially for preview environments and toy projects.
Thanks to Render I can focus on the stuff I really enjoy as an Elixir developer. Low level DevOps stuff is really not that. :-) If there's some feature I miss on Render, the chances are it is already on their roadmap and it is just a matter of month or two to have it available at my fingertips. If not, I can submit it as a feature request and I can be sure I will receive at least a reply.