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Comment by unwind | Hacker News Reader

As an utter n00b in modern web (all ends, front and back) development, what does it even mean that "static" sites are free, but so is also running Postgres?

If I have a "static" site, then I can't have any backend code that talks to the database, is that it? So the actual web pages can't use client-side Javascript to customize page content by talking to a backend, that talks to a database?

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The static site doesn’t cost anything. If it talks to a Postgres database hosted on Render, then you’ll pay for that PG db, but not for the static site itself.

As an example, I am currently hosting four sites on Render.

Two are Rails sites with databases, Redis, BG workers, etc. I pay a decent amount for those, albeit quite a bit less than Heroku.

Meanwhile, two others are static sites generated with Jekyll(?) that are pure content and require no DB. I add new content locally, push to GitHub, and deploy to Render automatically through a GH action. I pay $0/month for these two sites.

Each is a separate piece, it's not either-or. A "static site" means render.com would be serving up just static files to users, but those can include client-side JS files. Now, those files wouldn't have a server to talk to (unless they're talking to third-party APIs), but you could then set up a service and/or database alongside them. Pricing is different for each of those, but it looks like base-tier web services are also free.

Hope that helps

that is correct. though it looks like you can have some backend services for free at render as well (although it comes with limitations). so if you don't mind slow first load you could have a proper dynamic app within the free tier.

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