This and because it's so convenient to click some buttons and have your application running. I've stopped being lazy, though. Moved everything from Render to linode. I was paying render $50+/month. Now I'm paying $3-5.
I would never use one of those hosting providers again.
The point is, I used to just throw everything up on a PaaS. Heroku/Render, etc. and pay way more than I needed to, even if I had 0 users, lol.
I ran a LoB webapp for multiple companies on a similar setup. Turns out 1GB of RAM is insufficient to run even the most trivial Java webapps, like Jenkins, but is more than sufficient for even non-trivial things using Go + PostgreSQL.
Your stack may be slow, not the machine.
Does Vercel do the same?
But that is news to me. Interesting. Although for static sites, I always use Netlify or even GitHub pages.
From what I can figure out, Vercel charges "$0.60 per million invocations" [1], which would cost me $180 per day.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47611454 [1] https://vercel.com/docs/functions/usage-and-pricing#invocati...
I suspect I could do 3000+ rps with some tuning and a more modern CPU or hetzner VPS, but there's some fun cachet from running on an old Pi while there's still headroom.