This site runs free!
Posted by Souptik Datta on 2023-12-01 @ 18:51:49
If you have ever seen the source code of this site then you might have noticed that this is a WordPress decoupled site - i.e the backend is a WordPress site that is responsible for managing the content and exposing the data, while the front-end is written in React which consumes the data from the backend and displays it.
So, the front-end is running on a free Vercel account. The backend was previously running on a bare-metal home server, which worked perfectly fine except for limited performance and availability. The reason behind choosing this despite these two limitations is that this is a decoupled blog site and it will very rarely hit the backend as all the pages are cached indefinitely on front-end.
But still, there are some "Load More" features, and also the backend experience could have been a little better had I hosted it on some dedicated WordPress hosting service.
Previously I explored a few hosting services, but one biggest requirements I had is custom code deployment. And unfortunately, no one gave that opportunity in the free tier.
But recently I came across Pantheon! And that was the game changer. It had full-fledged code deployment support and I didn't see this simple code deployment anywhere. I had worked with other services also, but I liked this one because its not about how much automation they provide, it's all about how much flexibility they provide. But let's not divert to that topic and keep that for another article.
And therefore I deployed my backend codebase to Pantheon and that's it! My backend is now on a managed hosting service. Even if the free tier didn't provide custom domain support, that doesn't matter to me as I am using a decoupled solution! The computation power is less than the paid tiers, but still a little better than the bare-solution. The bare-metal has been a great starting point and I could have just kept on using that only with no problem, but with increasing data and to avoid infrastructure maintenance effort why not shift to a free managed hosting service!