Free Hosting Providers in 2023
Introduction
Heroku, the most popular free hosting provider, announced about the removal of their Free Product Plans which impacts free Heroku Dynos, Postgres, and Redis servers.
Free Heroku Postgres, free Heroku Data for Redis®, and free Heroku Dynos are no longer available.
If you have apps using these resources, you must upgrade to our new low-cost or other paid plans to ensure your apps continue to run and retain your data.
If you have an app deployed on free Heroku Dynos, you have to switch to the new Eco Dynos which costs 5$ per month.
Otherwise, if you still want to run your side projects for free, there are 4 great Heroku alternatives to deploy your apps in 2023.
We will go through each of them, and decide which is the best for your purposes. I will also provide deployment guides for each platform at the end of each section.
Render
The most similar service to Heroku is Render, and it’s the easiest platform to migrate to if you already had a deployed app on Heroku.
It’s easy to deploy a Web Service (alternative to Heroku Dyno) on Render. You just link your GitHub or GitLab repository and click Create Web Service. Render automatically builds and deploys your service every time you push to your repository.
Their platform has native support for Node.js, Python, Ruby, Elixir, Go, and Rust. If these don’t work for you, you can also build and deploy anything with a Dockerfile.
However, Render will shut down your free instances after 15mins of inactivity as we had in Heroku.
To deploy your app on Render, follow this Render Deployment Guide
Deta
Deta is a free cloud platform where you can build and deploy your ideas without worrying about server costs and without providing any credit card information.
If you’d like your app to be always running Deta is a better choice here compared to Render. If your app is in Node.js or Python you can have your app deployed there for free forever.
To deploy your app on Deta, check out the Deta Deployment Guide
Cyclic
Cyclic is serverless. There are no servers, no containers, or images. Each app is deployed entirely on serverless cloud infrastructure.
Cyclic is very similar to Deta. Even with a free tier apps do not have to sleep, wake up, spin up or recycle. All front-ends and back-ends are ready on-demand, immediately, and at all times.
The downside is that they also support only JavaScript and Python runtimes currently.
To deploy your app on Cyclic, follow Cyclic Deployment Guide
Fly.io
Fly.io is a Hosting Platform very similar to Heroku.
Fly.io has much wider support for programming languages compared to the other alternatives and is a very good alternative to Heroku if you are willing to provide your credit card details to get started. They won’t charge you if you don’t reach their free allowance limits.
To deploy your app on Fly.io, follow Fly.io Deployment Guide
🔗 Resources
- Fly.io — https://fly.io/
- Deta — https://www.deta.sh/
- Render — https://render.com/
- Cyclic — https://www.cyclic.sh/
- Heroku updated pricing — https://blog.heroku.com/new-low-cost-plans
- Heroku shutting down free tier plans — https://blog.heroku.com/next-chapter
- Fly.io free allowances — https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/#free-allowances
- Sample App — https://github.com/hayk-simonyan/basic-express-api
