I could do it on the website's javascript itself, except for the API keys needed to access the third party. So instead I'll put the API keys on the server and get the data and serve the result to the website.
Heroku cost $25/month. I can think of an AWS lambda + database that would theoretically be cheaper, or theoretically more expensive. But what would you guys use?
[1] https://vercel.com/docs/serverless-functions/supported-langu...
I’ve never been a fan of the serverless model, building on AWS Lambda etc, wiring up API gateways, slow cold starts, the hidden extra costs, EGRESS, gateway pricing etc.
Recently trying Cloudflare workers has been a pleasant experience. It’s still early, a few rough edges and limits to work within etc but I’m pretty convinced they are going to disrupt the serverless market. Fastly’s C@E is even more exciting being WASI but although Fastly advertise it as available you cannot go to their website give them your credit card number and use C@E. Likewise when C@E is generally available if the pricing is like the CDN it’ll be a non starter outside of business use.
Back to Cloudflare workers. Generous free tier, good non free tier pricing, static hosting, globally distributed workers by default, fast cold starts, WASM support, KV persistence, hook in to the cache easily, distributed objects for persistence if you can work around limitations. No need wiring up API gateways etc, write a traditional monolithic api with a router.
If you can design around utilising cloudflare it’d likely scale better than any cheap vps. I got a very long way for free with cloudflare then had to pay all of $5 to upgrade my plan as a worker needed 12ms cpu time instead of 10ms as was connecting to an Azure CosmosDb database and I think request signing eat in to my cpu budget.
Or pay $5 for a Digital Ocean, but probably needs a little bit more configurations
Digitalocean is $5 but you need to handle all the management that comes with it.
with render you just point it to a github repo and you're done.