Launched in April 2019, California-based Render is a fresh face in the cloud computing world. It aims to provide a cheaper alternative for developers and small businesses wanting to deploy their apps in the cloud.
Render’s sleek, interactive website in English, and its prices are displayed in U.S. dollars.
Features and Ease of Use
Render is a developer-friendly host that allows you to deploy almost anything to the cloud, including static sites, web apps, Dockerfiles, APIs, and PostgreSQL databases. You can deploy straight from GitHub or GitLab, then secure your site with free SSL and serve your content via a global CDN for faster loading and protection against DDoS attacks.
Deploy the following to the web with Render:
- Web Apps
- Static Sites
- Background Workers
- APIs
- Cron jobs
- Dockerfiles
- PostgreSQL
- Private Servers
Creating a PostgreSQL database takes just one minute with Render, and your database will sit on SSD storage for faster performance and greater reliability than traditional HDD storage. You don’t need to worry about losing data because this company conducts daily database backups that are retained for at least seven days.
The more technical among you can take advantage of Render’s “infrastructure as code” which means you can specify your infrastructure requirements in a YAML file and deposit it to GitHub to be picked up by this host.
Pricing and Support
Render offers competitive prices compared to other cloud platform providers such as Heroku, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. While all services are non-refundable, you can pay for what you use through monthly billing. Payment can be made using a major credit or debit card.
Support is provided via a community forum, a Slack chat channel, or email, but my exploratory email went unanswered. One-to-one support may not be needed, however, because Render has published a plethora of documentation relating to all the technologies it allows you to use:
