Sites I've built recently

Aside from my job, I like to build random sites. Recently, I've built https://zypley.com (video downloader), https://bobchart.com (ai flowchart creator), https://trackj.com (shipping tracking) and added https://q32.com (overview site, and a domain i’ve had forever).

Things I’ve noticed. fly.io is better than railway now for simple, small low-cost deployments of sites. q32, for example, is just a static site, and deploying on fly was free and fast.

Fly has a strange approach to caching. Instead of having a purpose built cache, fly just runs instances of your program on the edge. “Edge running” instead of “Edge caching”.

This might work ok, but you wind up having to write your own “Edge aware” code to deal with it.

Railway is more traditional, but the “always on” nature of the apps means the costs go up faster.

Fly was more fun. But the “launch” feature basically always guessed wrong on a number of my sites (I tend to write mixed-language sites, using node+python+rust), and I had to write a custom Dockerfile to deal with it.

Railway, with nixpacks, was easier to configure (just tell it you’re using python/node and it will get that all into one image). But you’ll wind up optimizing and switching to docker eventually anyway.