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Florian Schulz

08/30/2022, 12:56 PM
Question: Where can I run a WebSocket server for free (hobby project)? Heroku is limited (doesn’t run the whole month and will soon kill free plans). Alternatives?
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José Valim

08/30/2022, 1:19 PM
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Ivan Reese

08/30/2022, 2:49 PM
(Fly and Render are the two services everyone mentions immediately after lamenting the slow death of Heroku)
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Tony Worm

08/30/2022, 2:59 PM
Pretty much every major cloud provider has a free tier, as well as many of the developer focussed tools like cloudflare and netlify. In other words, you have lots of choices
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Florian Schulz

08/30/2022, 3:02 PM
Unfortunately, Netlify and Vercel don’t support WebSockets.
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Tony Worm

08/30/2022, 3:03 PM
I don't use them, I only use the big 3, primarily GCP for it's superior DX
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Florian Schulz

08/30/2022, 3:22 PM
I tried AWS, but found it very confusing and was quite shocked how bad it was – given it’s so popular and used in many major products. Also ended up paying for stuff that wasn’t running, just because I enabled a load balancer. Google Cloud Platform looks cleaner for sure 🙂
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Tony Worm

08/30/2022, 5:09 PM
Load balancers typically cost money because you need a public IP for them, which is what they are actually charging the flat rate for.
GCP is nice because the product names help you understand what they are. I never understood AWS's rational for randomly named products
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Florian Schulz

08/30/2022, 5:27 PM
Yes, it’s very confusing!
@José Valim Fly.io worked, thank you!