Pros and cons of Render.com vs Fly.io?

Good question, shame that nobody chimed in.

I haven’t tried Fly.io, but I have deployed a small application to Render and found it very easy. I’m simply using this small shell script to build the application and I’m using their Postgres offering with no problems:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -o errexit

# Install dependencies
mix deps.get --only prod

# Compile assets
MIX_ENV=prod mix compile
MIX_ENV=prod mix assets.deploy

# Create release
MIX_ENV=prod mix release --overwrite

I didn’t know about render.com, only fly.io. Good to know.

Render - much easier to setup, can deploy via git push, more expensive
Fly.io - setup process is buggier and frustrating, have to manually deploy new changes, but much cheaper + works well with Phoenix LiveView

I normally use Fly.io, but I switched to Render because I could not get flyctl to deploy my app at all. Overall, both are pretty good once your app is running in prod.

For transparency, I work at Render.

Thanks to @theodore and @jakobsen for sharing your experience with Render!

We do deploy from a git repo (github, gitlab, bitbucket), and we also have a few infrastructure-as-code options, such as our blueprints, and recently open sourced a Terraform provider as well.

I’m pretty new to Elixir, but if there’s anything I can help with about the platform, let me know!

I’ve been using Render for a long time, zero issues with them. They are the real deal. Love them a bunch! I never felt scared or on shaky ground when using their services.

I’ve tried all of these in the past 12 months exploring the landscape. In a linear graph from “Heroku” to “VPS do-it-yourself”:

|---------------------------------------------------------------|
Heroku    Render     Railway     NorthFlank    Fly   DigitalOcean

What did you dislike about Railway or NorthFlank btw?

Railway wouldn’t let me shell into a running box. In Render, I can click on Shell and then ./bin/myapp remote to get a rails console like experience.

Northflank had a lot of flexibility but I didn’t need that at that point in time. I just wanted a turnkey solution like Render.

Has anyone tried Render for a distributed Elixir cluster? I had chosen Fly for Mosslet for clustering because Render didn’t have that service at the time. Curious if anyone has tried Render’s and what their experience was.