Render

What do you like best?

The new auto-scaling support is really great, and deployment/management of databases is ten times easier than Heroku.

Another benefit of Render is how active their founder is on Twitter. It's kind of rare in my experience for someone to be so involved in the community, and seeing Anurag on almost every Render post that I've seen espousing the benefits of Render or addressing concerns gives me a lot of confidence in using the product to solve the needs of my business.

What do you dislike?

The company is still early on, so they aren't on the bleeding edge with Postgres upgrades, Redis support, etc. However, their roadmap looks really promising.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

If you have a pretty straightforward stack, Render is 100% the right choice for you. If you have a really complex stack with Redis and Elasticache (or other tools), while it all seems to be supported, it's not quite as first-class as I think they're aiming to have in the future.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Deploying code to production is hard. I've tried bare metal, Heroku, Digital Ocean Apps Platform, AWS Lightsail, and others. Render makes management and billing easier than any of the rest.

I love how active the company is on their roadmap in terms of communicating with stakeholders, which gives me way more confidence than I have at Heroku with Salesforce running the show and not very many updates.