Advantage over Serverless functions

Hi there, I’m trying compare Render vs. Vercel as the best deployment option. One of the biggest differences that I’m interested in is the Serverless functionality of Vercel vs. the managed hosting (i.e., auto-scaling container) of Render.
Why did Render go with managed hosting? Are there specific benefits/drawbacks to know?

Hi Dmitri,

Thanks for reaching out.

It’s very much an “it depends” kind of answer, there can be reasons to choose both.

Containers allow for more straightforward setup of traditional apps, whether that be a monolith of microservice-based. With complete control over the environment, you can run pretty much whatever language/library you want. While serverless functions can be quicker to get going, they can be limited by language, their environment or heavy/long-running requests.

If a project is written with serverless functions in mind, that’s probably the right way to go, and Render is considering a serverless offering.

However, if someone wanted to get an existing Elixir or PHP app up and running, with custom binaries and heavy processing, it’s likely going to need a container rather than try to rework it to work serverless (if the serverless service evens supports the language of choice).

Hope that helps

Alan

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Super helpful, thank you!

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