We all know how much hosting prices are increasing these days and when it comes to cloud hosting, it increases beyond limits. If you are thinking of using AWS for your personal project or prototype it will cost you enough to regret your decision. So here we come as a saver for you.
In this special article, we will use our personal experience and give you details of three hosting providers where you can easily push your Node.js application and make it go live for free. Just because they are free doesn’t mean they don’t have much uptime or RAM, we filtered lots of free hosting providers and picked the ones that are best for handling intermediate-scale Node.js applications easily. Let’s start with my favourite, Render.
If you don’t know – Difference between Development and Production Environments in Node.js
3 Best Node.js Free Hosting Services
1. Render
Render is a cloud-hosting platform that provides developers with an easy way to deploy their applications. It helps to get your application live by providing features like a free TLS certificate, global CDN, private network, etc. You can also deploy the app from the GitHub directory using this. This platform supports a variety of services including web services, static sites, cron jobs, and background workers.
Render comes with a free tier option that can host web services, static sites, and cron jobs with free pipeline minutes of 500, and a free bandwidth of 100 GB per month. It also offers a managed PostgreSQL database with automated backups and custom Docker containers.
Key Highlights of Render:
- Provide an easy way for building, deploying, and scaling Node.js applications.
- Free TLS certificates, global CDN, private networks, and auto deploys from Git.
- Decent pricing plans start at $19 for small teams and $29 for organizations.
- For individuals, it provides a free service with 500/month of free pipeline minutes and a free bandwidth of 100 GB.
- Supports web services, static sites, cron jobs, APIs, and background workers, and manages PostgreSQL.
Website:
2. Cyclic
Cyclic is another cloud-based platform that is primarily used for hosting full-stack JavaScript applications. Using it we can quickly deploy our full-stack application without any configurations. Since the platform is built on AWS, it is reliable and better in terms of speed. Cyclic is also popular for its quick deployment features with GitHub, which allows us to make our Node.js application go live in seconds.
Cyclic also comes with a free trial plan that lets us host one app with no delays or hourly limits which includes 1024 MB of RAM and can handle up to 1000 API requests each month. We can easily deploy Node.js or JavaScript-based framework applications. Taking about database in the free plan, it has 1 GB of storage in both DynamoDB and S3.
Key Highlights of Cyclic:
- Provide a super fast experience as built on AWS infrastructure making it best for full-stack applications.
- Offers instant deployments using GitHub allowing users to go live in seconds.
- Supports both Javascript and Typescript and enables deploying private repositories for privacy.
- Free trial plan available with 1024 MB RAM, 10s duration per request, autoscaling up to 100 * 1024 MB.
- Support up to 1000 API requests per month.
- Provide free SSL certificate and custom subdomain.
Website:
3. Vercel
Vercel is another very popular cloud-hosting platform. It is known for its easy-to-use feature. Vercel is mainly famous for deploying front-end frameworks like Next.js, but it also supports Node.js applications through serverless functions.
All the above hosting providers are basically for Node.js, but if you are looking to host Node-based front-end frameworks like React.js or Next.js, Vercel is the best for these and better than Render and Cyclic. It offers a Hobby plan which is free and gives 100 GB bandwidth and 1 GB storage for serverless functions.
Key Highlights of Vercel:
- Comes with a free Hobby plan for personal or small-scale applications which is enough to keep your front-end application live forever.
- Best for hosting modern JavaScript frameworks like Next.js.
- Offers direct deployment from Git to help push code from localhost to production in a few seconds.
- Provide support for serverless functions.
- A quick rollback feature to revert to any previous deployment.
- Friendly interface for managing environment variables in different deployment environments.
- Automatically optimises resources by performing image compression, code modifications, etc. for better performance.
Website:
Summary
In this article, we have looked at three hosting platforms where we can host our Node.js applications for free: Render, Cyclic, and Vercel. Render and Cyclic are best for Node.js applications while Vercel focuses more on front-end frameworks like Next.js. Three of them come with free plans so you don’t have to worry about pricing. Each of them is easy to use, even if you are a beginner you can easily host your application here.
Be sure to read this tutorial before pushing your app to production – 10 things you should do while running Node.js in production
