RenderIndie

Render got its start in 2019, and they been keeping it real by doing what a lot of these big cloud players can't, offering truly free static hosting without hiding fees up their sleeve. You throw up a static site, and it's like magic, with Cloudflare's CDN giving you unlimited bandwidth, custom domains, and free SSL. Plus, Git deploys make it easy to push changes. They ain't charging you a dime for that.

Now, if you need more than just static, like web services or databases, Render's there for you too. The cool part is how they bundle all this together, skipping the AWS drama with IAMs and crazy billing lines. You want a starter web service? It's $7 a month, and you don't have to worry about getting nickel-and-dimed like with AWS. You got a unified dashboard for everything, from static sites to databases like Postgres. Zero-downtime deploys come standard, which is pretty slick.

But hey, it ain't all gravy. If you running web services on the free tier, be ready for slow cold starts. And while their static hosting's smooth, if stuff goes sideways with Render itself, the status page might not catch up fast enough. They also don't have the same region variety as AWS or GCP, mostly sticking to US and EU. And if you on the lower Postgres plans, backup retention could be better. Still, for folks looking to dodge AWS's headaches and fees, Render's got a solid offer.