Top 4 Free Cloud Hosting Platforms
A Detailed Comparison of Zeit(Vercel), Netlify, Heroku and Surge
Contents
- Features
- Integrated tools
- Pros and Cons
- Pricing
- One on One comparisons
1.HEROKU
Heroku is a cloud application platform — a new way of building and deploying web apps. Heroku has been in development since June 2007, when it supported only the Ruby programming language, but now supports Java, Node.js, Scala, Clojure, Python, PHP, and Go. For this reason, Heroku is said to be a polyglot platform as it has features for a developer to build, run and scale applications in a similar manner across most languages. Heroku lets app developers spend 100% of their time on their application code, not managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling.
Integrated Tools
Slack, New Relic, Sentry, Travis CI, Twillio SendGrid, Terraform, CircleCI, Mailgun, Rollbar, HipCHat, Codeship, Fastly, Cloud9 IDE, Red Hat Codeready Workspaces, Papertrial, Contentful, MongoLab, Cloudinary, Drone.io, Heroku Postgres, Codecov
Pros
- Low dev-ops skills required
- Add-ons for almost everything
- Beginner friendly
- Easy to add collaborators
- Faster development
- Awesome documentation
- Natural companion for rails development
- Great customer support
- GitHub integration
- Free to launch a side project
- MySQL extension
- PostgreSQL forking and following
Cons
- Not a whole lot of flexibility
- Storage
- Low performance on free tier
Pricing
2.SURGE
Surge is a cloud platform for hosting static websites, which is extremely simple to use but offers customization options for those who need them. Their generous free tier permits unlimited publishing, using custom domains, and basic SSL, with more features available through the professional plan. Surge makes it easy for developers to deploy projects to a production-quality CDN through Grunt, Gulp, npm.
Pros
- Free plans
- Free custom domain support
- Free ssl
- Simple
- Deployment via command line
- Automatic urls based on filenames
- 404 status page based on 404.html
Cons
- No free redirects
Pricing
3.VERCEL
A cloud platform for server less deployment. It enables developers to host websites and web services that deploy instantly, scale automatically, and require no supervision, all with minimal configuration.
Vercel is a tool in the Static Web Hosting category of a tech stack.
A big feature is once again their Server less Functions offering, which is also using AWS Lambda under the covers. However, Vercel is a step up from Netlify, with more languages and more regions supported.
Integrated Tools
GitHub, GitLab, Lighthouse, Divjoy, ScaleGrid, Datasette
Pros
- Simple deployment
- Free tier
- Free SSL
- Simple setup
- Easy custom domain setup
- One tap build
- Build and deploy via git push
Cons
- It has some strict rules but this isn’t a big problem.
- It lacks features like database and the cloud storage
Pricing
4.NETLIFY
Netlify is smart enough to process your site and make sure all assets gets optimized and served with perfect caching-headers from a cookie-less domain. We make sure your HTML is served straight from our CDN edge nodes without any round-trip to our backend servers and are the only ones to give you instant cache invalidation when you push a new deploy. Netlify is also the only static hosting service with integrated continuous deployment.
Netlify has a lot of features and it feels more like an ecosystem of pluggable functionality (what they call add-ons), with flexible pricing.
Most notable add-on features:
- Serverless Functions
- Instant-forms
- Identity
- Analytics
Integrated Tools
Github, Bitbucket, Gatsby, Contentful, Hexo, Uploadcare, Forestry, Divjoy, Pubili, Redwood, NoCodeAPI, FeaturePeek, Scrivito
Pros
- Fastest static hosting and continuous deployments
- Super simple deploys
- Free SSL support
- Easy Setup and Continuous deployments
- Deploy previews
- Free plan for personal websites
- Great loop-in material on a blog
- Great drag and drop functionality
- Tech oriented and custom domains support
Cons
- Bandwidth limitation
Pricing
One on One comparisons
1.Heroku vs Surge
When comparing Heroku vs Surge, the Slant community recommends Heroku for most people. In the question“What is the best static website hosting provider?” Heroku is ranked 4th while Surge is ranked 14th.
Getting started with Heroku is very easy. It’s a very straightforward procedure and a beginner can set up their first app in two minutes. Often it’s just a matter of a couple of `git` commands and it’s all set up and running. The official Heroku [docmentation](https://devcenter.heroku.com/) also helps a lot.
2.Heroku vs Netlify
Netlify is an automation platform for web projects that is focused toward frontend developers. The main features include continuous integration out of the box, free SSL, and CDN. The platform is great of the easy of use, fast deployment, and continuous integration.
Heroku helps developers to build, run, and operate applications entirely in the cloud. It is focused toward backend development and allows web/mobile projects deployment. The main features include pre configured containers called Dynos and a fully-managed runtime environment. Advantages are the scalability and security protocols.
3.Heroku vs Vercel(Zeit)
Heroku and Zeit Now are primarily classified as “Platform as a Service” and “Static Web Hosting” tools respectively.
According to the StackShare community, Heroku has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1504 company stacks & 965 developers stacks; compared to Zeit Now, which is listed in 14 company stacks and 6 developer stacks.
Some of the features offered by Heroku are:
- Agile deployment for Ruby, Node.js, Clojure, Java, Python, Go and Scala.
- Run and scale any type of app.
- Total visibility across your entire app.
On the other hand, Zeit Now provides the following key features:
- Easy, production-ready deployment with one command
- Simple scaling, including auto-scaling
- No-Ops
