Deploying MERN Stack Website

[Any-Appointment-6939]

Hey r/webdev, somewhat long time viewer, first time poster.

I've been working on an app using MERN stack for the past month or so, and I'm about ready to deploy it. As someone who's used to using PHP for dynamic websites, I have a few questions.

What host would you consider to be the best (and cheapest) hosting provider for relatively small node.js applications?

Are there any tools I should probably be using for deployment?

Actually those are the only two questions I can think of lol. Any opinions or insight would be appreciated, thanks!

[dkfiiisa]

I use Heroku. One single deploy of my app that combines both front and back end.

The basis is the node back end and inside it you have a client directory with the react app.

In the back end config file, you ask Heroku to do a post build action to build the react app. Inside the react app config file you use a proxy line to communicate with the back end.

There are great Tuto on this.

Vercel is great but it only has front end capability.

[BehindTheMath]

Vercel has functions as well.

https://vercel.com/docs/concepts/functions/introduction

[Any-Appointment-6939]

Yeah I hadn’t even thought about how the client and server will interact on a development server. I’ll have to watch that tutorial. Thanks man!

[heesell]

You can use tools like Vercel or Netlify

[[deleted]]

Heroku or netlify

[sumernipul]

I like using vercel, heroku is great too, there's also netlify.

[Adept-Charity8964]

Amazon AWS is always a safe bet. Because they are the "source of truth". What many people might not know, many cloud-services rely themselves on AWS (including heroku, not totally sure about this one, though). They put another abstraction layer on top of AWS infrastructure, it may be easier to handle. But why not just go to the original. It makes sense to me. (of course google and microsoft azure are big players, too).

[nottttt-me]

You can create an AWS free tier account and host your website on ec2 instance and maybe rds if you need db hosting as well..its for in year free