Render.com is Not a Good Heroku Replacement

After doing some research into a repleacement for Heroku, I was excited to try Render. I've been using Heroku for many years, and it's getting a little pricey for me. I pay for their $25/$50 dynos, so I thought paying the same $25 to Render for their web services offering would be a pretty close drop in replacement with double the RAM space offered by Heroku. The next plan was $80, which I thought might be for higher scale than I needed, given that it's way more expensive than what I was paying Heroku.

Unfortunately, Render proved to be completely unusable for my purposes. Everything slowed down to a crawl. My server would fail to attach to the port, and, after it eventually starts up, my API requests were taking seconds to process. Even my database engine was slower, with response times going from sub-second on Heroku to many seconds on Render. My service has 10K+ visitors per week calling various endpoints against my server.

It took me days to figure out what was wrong. I looked everywhere else before evening considering that it might be Render causing the incredible slow down. I thought my database provider might have been throttling me; that wasn't the case as support showed me clear metrics that have remained consistent for months. I thought my code was broken somehow. I reverted to code I knew once ran fast, and still no luck.

After 3 days of frustration, I finally consider switching back to Heroku with the same exact code. Everything was nice and fast again. I suspended my Render service and then deleted it after confirming all was well back in Heroku land.

I really wanted Render to be able to replace Heroku, but it is all way too slow.