Daniel Crewdson

Posted on Jul 24, 2019

Heroku, Now.sh, Netlify. What are you using and why?

#javascript #node #cloud

I've been playing around with these platforms for a few months, hosting small node projects on each, but this is getting a little tiring going back and forth from each one.

Thought it would be worth getting DEVs thoughts on these platforms and which ones are being used more in the DEV community.

So, do you use any of these to host your js/node projects?

If yes, which one and why? 👨‍💻👩‍💻

Happy coding!

Top comments (23)

Amandeep Singh • Jul 25 '19

I have used all ZEIT Now, Heroku, Netlify and Google Firebase. All have features which are unique to their platform, and no one is going to stop making the developer experience better anytime soon, which is extremely good for us all.

I have stuck with ZEIT Now as their developer experience outshines the competitors in more than many use cases. Here are some outshiners:

Support for many languages and that even in the same repo
Ability to make deployments from command line without adding any configuration for most use cases
Just hit ‘now’ from command-line without any required configuration, and boom, deployment is ready
Generous free tier along with super pocket friendly paid plan
Auto scaling deployments
Best performance - Best time waking up from cold boot; and further less time for subsequent requests
Every pull request creates a new deployment on Github; super easy to review changes iteratively, and ability to test deployement of codebase at any point in time as all check-ins create a new url

and if that is already not enough, here is the best one:

super talented, down to earth team, who works closely with community on their Slack education channel

Mark Drew • Jul 25 '19 • Edited

I know ZEIT since 2017, I have seen its products evolve, documentation etc. I can give a totally honest opinion of ZEIT : )

2017 & 2018 (until the middle of the year) a container-based approach

Pros:

Really everything was through a single command

Cons:

the documentation was not so clear
you pay much more
not so scalable
waiting times were long

2018 (October) - It's time Serverless <3

pros:

the application can scale automatically
pay on-deman
the documentation improved a lot 😎
the guides created by the community are being promoted
integration GitHub and GitLab
access to your app without any waiting time (thank to builder of ▲now)
a community in spectrum
excellent customer support

Cons:

now.json, It is necessary to define it when you want to implement an application of node but very soon it will not be necessary to define now.json. You will only have to execute the now command and that's it 😍

I hope I have helped 🙏

James Perkins • Jul 24 '19

Netlify for a couple sites and then a raspberry pi 3b+ for light node projects

Daniel Crewdson • Jul 24 '19

Nifty! Thinking about grabbing a pi 4 to toy around with, they look like a lot of fun 😀

James Perkins • Jul 24 '19

They are pretty great.. Once the project is production ready it moves off the pi but it helps to be able to deploy and show to whoever outside my network. Plus the non existent latency makes it feel faster then free heroku / digital ocean 5 dollar account

Kushagra Gour • Jul 25 '19

We use Zeit for CSSBattle for our web app deployment. Super easy. Super fast. And amazing features like aliases. We also did a case study with Zeit -> zeit.co/case-studies/cssbattle

Seanmclem • Jul 24 '19

Finally tried heroku for a node server the other day. I was blown away how easy it was. I setup the server on my local machine. Signed up, installed the heroku cli, and ran 2 commands. 1 minute later and I had a url to my node server in the cloud. I waited so long to try it because I thought it would be complicated, but it was super easy

Max Ong Zong Bao • Jul 25 '19 • Edited

I host my personal blog on Netlify cause I don't need to spend tons of time in deploying and it's really pain-free for me whenever I complete an article.

It takes advantage of CI/CD to help me deploy my newly created articles.

Rahul Chowdhury 🕶 • Jul 24 '19

I use both Heroku and Netlify.

Heroku for microservices with Node.js/Express.

Netlify to host my static website built with Jekyll.

Daniel Crewdson • Jul 24 '19

That seems like a logical split between the two platforms, I've been really enjoying how easy Heruko makes getting an express server up and running 🚀

Rahul Chowdhury 🕶 • Jul 24 '19

Yes, that's the reason I chose Heroku over spinning up a DO droplet and setting everything up for such a small service.

Since deployments to Heroku happen through Git, I don't need to set up and maintain tons of CD pipelines for my microservices. 😁

Mark Tse • Jul 24 '19

Netlify for front-end, because it's so easy to set up. It's also easy to proxy any backend needs elsewhere via redirects.

I use Serverless Framework and AWS for backend because of its low cost while having flexibility to add more (also low cost) services (e.g DynamoDB).

David Kistauri • Jul 25 '19

Use Netlify with their CMS to deploy Gatsby blog

Juliano Rodrigues • Jul 24 '19

I'm currently using Netlify to deploy/host my site. The documentation in Netlify is super helpful and very user friendly.

Sm0ke • Jul 24 '19

Heroku, super easy to use.

Mahesh K • Jul 24 '19

Neetlify, yet to try Heroku and Now.sh in any big project.

CodingCoop • Feb 14 '20

Why heroku/now for larger projects? Databases?

Seb • Jul 24 '19

Netlify for static sites. Absolutely love how easy it is. And deploy straight from git is just 🤩. I wish there was a solution like this for some of our php sites 😢.

Amandeep Singh • Jul 25 '19

@seb True that. All ZEIT Now, Netlify and Heroku shine with their github integrations.

ZEIT now shines with your use case. The good news is ZEIT Now does supports Php 🙂

Hayden Young • Aug 19 '19

I'm using Now.sh and Heroku, but I used Netlify once for a school project. I use Now and Heroku (mainly heroku) for node projects, but I'm hoping to move that all to Now.