stack-on-a-budget/pages/app-hosting.md

App hosting

• App hosting
  • AppHarbor
  • AWS EC2
  • Azure App Service
  • GearHost
  • Glitch
  • Google App Engine
  • Google Compute Engine
  • Heroku
  • IBM Cloud
  • OpeNode
  • OpenShift
  • Oracle
  • Vercel

AppHarbor

Pricing page

• Free tier: 1 worker unit
• Pros: auto scaling, deploy with git, one of few PaaS for .NET apps
• Limitations: no custom domain

AWS EC2

Product page

• Free tier: 750 hours/month of t2.micro instances
• Limitations: expires 12 months after sign-up

Azure App Service

Pricing page

• Free tier: 10 applications, 1 shared core, 1GB RAM and 1GB storage per application
• Pros: supports .NET, easy publishing directly from Git/GitHub/Bitbucket
• Limitations: cumulative limit for CPU (60 minutes allowed every 24 hours), no SLA, no custom domain, no SSL

GearHost

Pricing page

• Free tier: 1 shared node and 1 worker at max, 100MB storage, 1GB bandwidth/month, custom domains
• Pros: supports .NET (4.6), PHP (5.3-5.5) and Node.js apps, MSSQL and MySQL databases, easy publishing over FTP, WebDeploy or directly from Git/GitHub/Bitbucket
• Limitation: cumulative limits for CPU (60 minutes allowed every 24 hours) and RAM (256 MB allocated every hour), 1 GB bandwidth allowd every 24 hours, 250 concurrent connections, no SSL support, only 32bits processes
• Exceeding the free tier: whenever the CPU usage, RAM usage or consumed bandwidth reaches the limit within its timefame, the application goes offline until the counter resets

Glitch

About page

• Free tier: instantly deployed Node.js app with collaboration tool, 1000 project hours, 4000 requests/hour, 512MB ram, 200MB disk excluding node_modules, custom domain
• Pros: based on Node.js, online editor with real time collaboration, live redeploy, great for prototyping and collaboration
• Limitations: free tier instances will sleep after 5 mins of inactivity but will turn on when someone accesses the website

Google App Engine

Platform for building scalable web applications and mobile backends

Product page

• Free tier: 28 instance hours/day, 1GB outgoing traffic/day, 1GB incoming traffic/day, 5GB Cloud storage, Shared memcache, 1000 search operations per day, 10 MB search indexing, 100 emails per day
• Pros: managed, automatic scaling, plays well with other Google Cloud features (load balancing, datastores...), multiple languages supported
• Limitations: free tier only applies to standard environment which supports Python, Java, PHP and Go. Flexible environment with Node.js and Ruby is not in the free tier.

Google Compute Engine

Scalable, high-performance virtual machines

Product page

• Free tier: 1 f1-micro instance per month (US regions only), 30 GB-months HDD, 5 GB-months snapshot, 1 GB network egress from North America to all region destinations per month (excluding China and Australia)
• Pros: plays well with other Google Cloud features (load balancing, datastores...)
• Limitations: for now limited to US region only

Heroku

Pricing page

• Free tier: one "dyno" (512MB memory), custom domains
• Pros: supports multiple languages (Node.js, Ruby, Java, PHP, Python, Go, Scala or Clojure)
• Limitations: instance will sleep after 30 mins of inactivity

IBM Cloud

Pricing page

• Free tier: 512MB/month
• Pros: can deploy multiple smaller instance for free for a total of 512MB (4x128MB, 2x256MB...), supports multiple languages (Java, JS, Go, PHP, Python Ruby), supports containers

OpeNode

Pricing page

• Free tier: 100MB RAM, 1GB Storage, 100GB Bandwidth / Month
• Limitations: Your code will be open-sourced unless you declare your project is educational (for students)

OpenShift

Pricing page

• Free tier: 1 project, 2GB memory, 2GB storage, no custom domain
• Pros: gears can be used to deploy apps in a lot of languages and/or databases, many deployment templates are provided
• Limitations: deployment requires installation of OpenShift app, 'idle' apps take longer to load (>30s)

Oracle

Pricing page

• Free tier: 2 Compute instances (1/8th OCPU, 1GB memory each)
• Pros: Free forever virtual machines
• Limitations: OS selection restricted to Oracle Enterprise Linux, CentOS and Ubuntu

Vercel

Pricing page

• Free tier: 100GB bandwidth per month, 100 deployments per day, 12 serverless functions written in Node.js, Go, Python and Ruby
• Pros: Next.js API endpoints are converted to serverless functions automatically. Also see for static hosting.
• Limitations: Free tier doesn't include commercial usage