I recently wrote about the deployment journey behind QuizRank.
I went from thinking Render's free tier couldn't handle the backend, to discovering that I had some deployment and architecture issues to fix instead. Along the way, I moved between Coolify, self-hosting, and Render, optimized the leaderboard to handle growth more efficiently, added uptime monitoring, and even ran into a Vercel/GitHub account issue.
If you're interested in the lessons I learned about building and deploying scalable applications on limited infrastructure, check it out on DEV.to: