After finding out that Heroku was going to be eradicating their free plans, I set out to find an alternative. I first I thought it would be easy to use AWS’s elastic beanstalk, but it was just a headache and not worth the potential cost. Then, I stumbled upon fly.io, and it has been looking great.
Using windows Powershell, you deploy a app with a few simple commands similar to Heroku.
Also, since I’ve been using it, I have not paid anything or even put in a payment method. It is a pay as you go service and many of the costs seem to be virtually free.
On top of that, you can get free certificates on your site (https) using Let’s encrypt (which is not an option that I know of with Heroku) AND you can use custom domains for free with fly.io (You still actually have to get the domain from a place like google domains).
Even better is the fact that I have not experienced any downtime or have had the site spin down after 30 minutes of inactivity.
Now there are a few cons: One of them being that I have not seen or heard much about fly.io compared to other hosting services. Also the deployment of my site takes a few more minutes then it took to deploy on Heroku. Finally, I have noticed the site runs slightly slower than on Heroku, but it is not very noticeable.
I am willing, however, to deal with the slightly longer load times to have access to SSL certificates, almost constant uptime, custom domains, and a decent/easy to use backend hosting service without having to put in a payment method.
If you would like to view my site, it can be found @ lowellvcm.com