CapRover

Thu Jan 11 2024

Render.com raised their prices last year. Their "Starter" instance type (512 MB / 0.5 CPU) is $7 per month. The next step up is their "Standard" instance type (2 GB / 1 CPU) which increased to $25 per month. Most of the services I manage are too big for a 512MB instance and to small for the 2Gb instance. If you're up for a laugh go check on the pricing of their 4GB and above instances. Current pricing is here. On render.com you can only run one app (container) per service so there isn't a way to leverage extra capacity either.

So how am I going to cost effectively host all of our services now? One option is to run everything on a self hosted VM using a combination of GitHub deploys, PM2, and Caddy which I wrote about a while back. While extremely reliable, that setup has some issues. The main one being that it results in a very opaque configuration that would be nearly impossible for someone else to maintain.

Enter CapRover.

Wait a second... "CapRover"? Rover is definitely a funny dog name, but something about CapRover is really annoying to me. There has to be a much cooler play off the word "captain" for a tool like this. I honestly almost didn't try it out because of the name, but I sure am glad that I did.

CapRover is an open source platform as a service. Send your code and it'll run it with docker and proxy it with nginx. I found it to be one of those great open source projects that just worked for me. No weird hacks or gotchas.

Here are my favorite things about it so far:

Things I didn't like about CapRover:

via GIPHY

In this age of rapidly increasing costs, a tool like CapRover can unlock huge savings. I highly recommend you give it a try.