Render Service Types
Identify the right service type for your use case.
Render supports five different service types for hosting your app:
- Web services (most common)
- Static sites
- Private services
- Background workers
- Cron jobs
You can also create fully managed datastores to use with your app:
Choosing a service type is the first step of creating a new service in the Render Dashboard:
Which service type is right for my app?
See below for a summary of each service type, along with links to full documentation.
Summary of service types
For running code
| Service Type | Description |
|---|---|
|
The most common service type. Dynamic web apps with a public If you’re building a public web app using Express, Django, Rails, or something similar, use this service type. To get started, you can create a free instance. | |
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Apps that consist entirely of statically served assets (commonly HTML, CSS, and JS). Static sites have a public Create a static site if you’re building with a framework like: | |
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Dynamic web apps that don’t have a public URL. Private services do expose an internal hostname for receiving traffic from your other Render services over their shared private network. Private services are great for deploying tools like: | |
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Internal apps that run continuously, often to process jobs that are added to a Redis-backed queue or similar. Background workers do not expose a URL or internal hostname, but they can send outbound requests to other service types. Use background workers with a framework like: | |
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Internal apps that run—and then exit—on a defined schedule. A cron job might run a single bash command, a script with multiple commands, or a compiled executable. Cron jobs do not expose a URL or internal hostname, but they can send outbound requests to other service types. |
For storing data
In addition to the managed datastores below, Render supports attaching a persistent disk to most other service types.
| Service Type | Description |
|---|---|
|
A powerful, open-source relational database. To get started, you can create a free instance that expires after 30 days. Render captures daily backups of all paid PostgreSQL instances. Larger instances support features like read replicas, point-in-time recovery, and high availability. | |
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An in-memory key-value store that’s ideal for use as a job queue or a distributed cache. To get started, you can create a free instance. All paid Redis instances regularly write to disk to persist data across restarts. |