I mentioned in another thread, but not a fan of Heroku. It is easy to use, but they’ll steal your lunch money real quick…especially for their DB instances.
Could we get guides added for Digital Ocean/Vultr/etc.? DO may require more work and not be free from the start, but their $5 would be sufficient for basic project(s). Shoot Vultr offers a $2.50 instance that is IPv6 only that might work for what I’m going to be using it for!
Anyway, I feel like there is a lot of bandwidth to be gained by creating a “Deploy DB to a VPS provider” type of addition!
If you are looking to use a Postgres database, the configuration instructions are not really different (that I can think of off hand) depending on where your database is (as long as it is accessible on internet ie not hosting locally or whatnot) and that you’ve created it already:
You just need the connection string info for the DATABASE_URL env: postgres://<user>:<pass>@<url>/<db>?connection_limit=1
The tutorial walks the user through how to create a new database on Heroku as a guide because they offer a free tier (which is adequate and no risk/commitment for the tutorial) and for people who want to get started quickly, it is relatively straightforward especially for people who are new to the backend world.
The only real important part is the recommendation to use connection_limit=1:
Note there is work in progress to deploy the web and api sides to places other than Netlify or Vercel (AWS serverless for example for the api side). Note Netlify & Vercel do offer free tiers.
I also looked at https://render.com/pricing#databases for databases but once you get up in the tiers, the overall cost different wasn’t that much different than Heroku (and they do not offer a free tier).