Switch to a different backend provider (Railway has ended its free tier )

[furquan-lp]

As Railway has downgraded its free tier into a month long free trial (which is now over), it's time to look for an alternative service.

Currently the backend is being hosted on render.com as a stopgap but it has several critical issues:

• Very slow spin up time (free tier instances will spin down with inactivity) - This is the main issue causing issues with NEXTDEV not properly loading any of the assets it needs making the website appear unresponsive
• High non free tier pricing ($7/month)
• Poor integration with Cloudflare DNS

Render on the free tier seems okay for a website but not for an Express server like this.

Current alternatives being investigated are:

• Fly.io
• Cyclic

[furquan-lp]

Cyclic seems like a good alternative for now. It has a generous free tier and an extremely cheap paid usage-based tier:

• $1/app/month
• Instantly available applications (no spin up time)
• JS/TS and even Python/Go (beta) support

Overall it seems worth investigating with the free tier and then transitioning to the usage based $1/month tier (mainly for custom domains).

[furquan-lp]

The project has been switched to DigitalOcean for the time being. This will remain until the free credit lasts (2 months). Issue to be reopened when the expiration date draws near.

[furquan-lp]

DigitalOcean is expiring in 3 days so I've reopened this issue to keep track.