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Ask HN: What free services can I use for a back-end?

35 points by ateesdalejr ↗ HN
I as a student who doesn't quite have a job, rely on free services like GitHub pages to host my projects. One of the problems I have with this approach is finding reliable hosts that are free of cost. I have been looking around for any free services that allow hosting a back-end a few I've seen are https://pythonanywhere.com Most others I find only offer PHP hosting do any of you own some good back-end hosting services that are somewhat usable and don't run on outdated versions of a language?

22 comments

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fourmii
Not sure what exactly on the back-end you're after. But why not use the free tier on Google Cloud, AWS or Azure? I've been using GCP for a few months for free (you get $300 credit when you first sign up):

https://cloud.google.com/free/

That way, you can just build or use whatever back-end services you need.

busymichael
Just to back this up -- I launched https://dndemail.com on Google Cloud earlier this year. I have 250 users and still haven't used the full $300 credit. It was a great way to prototype, test, and launch.
Blackstone4
Graph.cool
Can_Not
Just wanted to share some information that I think a lot of people will want to know before diving in:

> Every Graphcool service comes with an AWS Aurora instance that is backing the GraphQL server. https://github.com/graphcool/framework/blob/master/docs/02-C...

> Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible relational database built for the cloud https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora

The free tier currently provides 100MB of database.

bananamansion
comparitively, is that bad or good
Can_Not
I've surfed for some free DBs in the past. Most free hosts don't allow remote connections. Some services I've seen 50MB and 20MB but were uselessly slow. If you're not paying, I suspect this is actually good.
tedmiston
Heroku or Firebase

Or just spend $5/mo on DigitalOcean.

amorphid
+1 vote for Heroku.

Re: spending a little money, Scaleway has some the cheapest servers I've seen & would consider using. 2.99 Euros (3.54 USD as of now) for a server w/ 2GB of RAM & 50GB of storage is a pretty solid deal (if it works well, and I haven't heavily used it). Pricing info at https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/.

[1] https://www.scaleway.com/pricing/ 2.99 Euro equals 3.54 US Dollar

Tepix
Hang out on lowendtalk and grab something like a $8/year VPS special offer and run your stuff there. Administrating it will also be a good learning experience.
forkLding
Firebase is definitely good to use, essentially free if its not a huge-ass application that is massively scaling up.
Can_Not
Zeit now is great for static sites or nodejs. You would be on your own for anything stateful. Some options for stateful add-ons (from other companies) include vultr's $2.50/month VPS if you need postgre or redis, firebase has a free tier, digital ocean's S3 alternative is cheaper than AWS's.
segmondy
Vultr has an instance for $2.50 a month. If that's too much money for you. Host one on your personal computer at home/in the dorm and use Dynamic DNS.
dhruvkar
Netlify.com

Just static sites, so brush up on that Javascript.

GFischer
Maybe you qualify for Microsoft's Dreamspark or you can sign up for the Microsoft Imagine cup and get some free credits.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/member-offers/imag...

https://imagine.microsoft.com/en-us/custom/Dreamspark

That comes with some Azure credits you can use for .NET or Node or PHP apps :) and backends such as MsSQL or CosmosDB (Microsoft's MongoDB) . I don't know how long it lasts though (1 year at the very least).

I have a Microsoft BizSpark account and it's great.

ateesdalejr
Ah, I hadn't seen this before. I'll give it a try.
bigmanwalter
I'm a huge fan of PythonAnywhere. I use it for all my own projects as well as for anything I'm building for clients :)
ecesena
I run most of my side projects on a combination of app engine, firebase, and some times even just google spreadsheet.

To me Gcloud is also a pretty good bet because they have a very good startup plan ($100k in credits) in case you want to bring any of your projects to the next level.

(this is not to say that others have bad services, this is just my personal pref for my own things)