I just received an email notification from Heroku that they are discontinuing their free tier for web dynos and Postgres, so I’m looking for an alternative for free hosting of my Strapi V4/Postgres backend for my NextJS blog. Can anyone point me in the right direction for what is generally considered the next best thing to Heroku?
Not sure of free ones, but there is plenty of hosting out there.
Check the deployment docs for a bunch of hosting providers.
Do you have a way to transfer your data over? I am struggling with this as I have a lot of valiuable data on my production deployment. Also I have heard that digital ocean is pretty good
I’ve successfully deployed my Strapi app over to both Digital Ocean and Railway.app. I found migrating my PostgreSQL database over from Heroku to either of these platforms very easy.
The migration over to Digital Ocean was a bit more involved than moving it to Railway, as I decided to use Dokku as the runtime environment there (using the Dokku-specific droplet). But after a day of fiddling with it, it turned out to be not too bad and it’s happily running over there right now. I will let the app run on both alternative platforms until mid November, and will decide which one to keep based upon final costs, etc, but if I were to pick a platform right now I think Railway will land up being the one I go with.
Firstly thanks for taking the time to answer my question I really appreciate it.
I don’t know how to do anything with the physical Postgres database for that matter.
I know that you are doing me a huge favor just by replying to my message, but it would be greatly appreciated if you could give me some direction as to the steps I need to take to transfer my database over.
Sure, no problem. Try moving your app over to Railway. Read the articles at these 2 links:
Migrating from Heroku to Railway
How to backup and restore your Postgres DB
The 2nd link has Heroku-specific instructions that I followed and worked perfectly. Give me a shout if you need any further guidance.