Off the Bit
Tools: Render
Category: Hosting and cloud
Site: render.com
Render
Application hosting for services, databases and cron, positioned between a platform-as-a-service and raw cloud.
Heroku's shape without Heroku's pricing history.
What it is sold for
Deploying a web service and its database together.
Same shelf
The rest of hosting and cloud, alphabetically. Sharing a category is a filing decision, not a relationship.
- Adaptable did not answerTemplate-driven deployment of applications and databases. The domain no longer resolves.
- The cloud that set the vocabulary. Nearly everything else in this catalogue either runs on it or is defined against it.
- Microsoft's cloud, strongest where an organisation already runs on Windows, Active Directory and Office.
- Sandboxes, queues and model inference with fast cold starts, sold on how quickly a container becomes ready.
- A control plane that provisions infrastructure and runs distributed applications without requiring an operations team.
- DigitalOcean's managed application hosting, deploying from a repository without cluster management.
- A cloud that competed on comprehensible pricing and documentation rather than on breadth, now pushing inference too.
- Runs applications and now agent sandboxes close to users, with virtual machines rather than shared containers.
ImranTools[Render]