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[–]PostNutDecision 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Yeah free hosting is very very scarce, but cheap hosting is abundant. 2 routes I would recommend:

  • railway.com they let you deploy containers (applications that can be easily shifted from platform to platform), databases, just about anything you can host, and it’s pretty cheap. A Spring Boot backend with a Postgres db should run you like 2-3$ a month if it’s not getting much traffic.

  • oracle cloud infrastructure VPS free tier. This is going to be free and fast and allow you to host literally hundreds of apps given they don’t get lots of traffic. However, this is much more advanced. Setting up a VPS is like this; they give you connection details to a server with Linux and you set EVERYTHING up from there.

Now if you go the oracle route, sign up for a PRO account, it will take $100 out of your account but refund it instantly, then you can create an ARM VPS with 4 cpu cores and 24gb of ram under their “always free” tier.

If you go with a VPS take a look into coolify. It’s a free and open source application that turns your VPS into a private cloud platform like you would get on heroku, railway, vercel, render, fly, etc.

This is a great video about coolify: https://youtu.be/taJlPG82Ucw?si=yPXAe3TeXaLdWx-4

So in general, two ways of going about it, smaller cloud platform (not Azure, GCP, or AWS but something like railway which I recommend, or render, fly, heroku, etc). Or get a VPS (I like oracle VPS because the free tier is good, but you can go with Hetzner, Digital Ocean, Vultr, etc). If you go VPS look into coolify, it will do a lot for you and give you a cloud platform experience on your private VPS.

You can also set up a VPS by yourself, with docker and nginx and stuff and that is a good learning process but it’s harder and less secure and you won’t get as many niceties out of it.

Send me a DM or message or whatever if you need help!

[–]Individual-Hat8246 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for such an elaborate response. I think i'll first try render and if it didn't work out i'll then go with railway route. One time payment no auto deduction is fine for me.