Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

Being a small-scale Heroku user, I have a hard time deciding whether to stay with Heroku or move to render.com or fly.io. Before the latest incident, Heroku seemed to be frozen but stable. Now… I don't know. Are they even trying to bring back Github Connect?

Fly.io seems cutting-edge but I feel I would not profit from their multi-region, close to the user infrastructure. So what are their tradeoffs? Render.com appears more complete (?) and cheaper. But they don't have the same elegant database backups or the pipeline with review apps.

i used both Render and Fly.io

Render is more user-friendly and great for teams, but Fly.io is more flexible and has more advanced features

Fly.io isn't as much cutting-edge as it is a rethink on what devex on Cloud should look like. It is a fantastic offering that despite its shortcomings is really a delight to use. I use it for toy projects (mostly stateless, or state stored elsewhere but not on Fly.io), but there are plenty who run pretty serious workloads. Give it a spin! You'd be surprised how butter-smooth all that cutting-edge is.

Render has native automatic backups for PostgreSQL: https://render.com/docs/databases#backups

Review apps on Render are called Preview Environments: https://render.com/docs/preview-environments

> [...] despite its shortcomings [...]

What do you see as some of its shortcomings? Do e.g. semi-broken docs (or other instances of unclear/uncertain messaging) factor into your impression?

Last week I couldn't get Fly.io to spin up a simple Postgres database for my app. I've now been on Render for a week with multiple production apps, and so far it has been working fine.

Docs, oh god yes. They're the anti-Stripe in this regard.

And hard-to-debug deploy-time (and sometimes runtime / uptime) issues are a major sticking point. It is hard to know what or who's at fault without asking for it in the forums, since you can't stackoverflow much.

Their support (granted it's free) is a bit of a hit and a miss; while it isn't clear what really is on their roadmap (or important) and what isn't (even though, they are more than transparent than other providers I've interacted with).

These are but pains that come with adopting a nascent ecosystem, I suppose. I still persist with Fly because it is still simpler to build certain apps on it than on any other BigCloud (bar Cloudflare).