Hey everyone! I'm a second-year computer science student diving into web development and I'm working on a small project for my portfolio. The app will use either Express or NestJS for the backend and React for the frontend. With not expecting much traffic, I want to make it lightweight. I plan to use WebSockets and possibly the Stripe API, but for now, I'm not focusing on Docker or containerization.
I'm good to go with deploying the frontend on Vercel since it's easy, but I'm really overwhelmed by the backend options. I've discovered that Vercel doesn't support WebSockets, so I've been looking into alternatives:
- VPS options like Hetzner or DigitalOcean
- Major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, or GCP
- Cloud platforms such as Render, Heroku, Railway
Which option would you guys recommend for a small portfolio project? What are the pros and cons of each? Since I'm a broke college student, I'd prefer anything with a free tier, but I'm open to spending a bit if it means better services!
1 Answer
For a small hobby project, I’d say start with whatever has a good free tier. AWS is great because their free tier lasts a full year. It’s good experience to have AWS on your resume too. Hetzner is great but lacks the managed services of AWS or Azure. I have some small VPS on Hetzner myself, but I still lean on AWS for most things.

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