Check Netlify

Or Vercel

Best scaling in their free plans

Heroku hobby is a joke in comparison and hasnt been updated in a decade while all their addons have gotten less and less featured while costing more and more

I host all my static assets on IPFS which practically nullifies the bandwidth limits of Netlify

Could you elaborate on how you use IPFS? How fast is it? Do you use use a pinning service?

I upload static assets to IPFS and add those static links to my project instead of having an "assets" folder.

IPFS is fast enough, I had these concerns too so I use a gateway for links as some of them cache files on their own CDN, for free.

Yes, I use a pinning service, I was extremely hesitant as many of them are just SaaS hosting like Pinata is and charge by bandwidth used, but there are free ones like https://web3.storage which for some reason is combining Filecoin and IPFS together for each upload and liveness/pinning.

Ironically, Pinata also acts as a gateway and can then be used for free if you want. But there are other gateways. Cloudfront has one but what it decides to cache is strange.

GCP Cloud Build + Cloud Run is a pretty good alternative for Heroku

Render.com is pretty great and they recently introduced free plans for Hobby usage.

Supports web services, static sites and Postgres/Redis.

Dosen’t criticising competitors increase competition? “We taste better than x”, “we have higher quality than x”, “we’re like x but cheaper?”

I don’t like this either. I think maybe people are more used to this in the US, but I personally think that if you can’t be objective you need to be more humble in your communication.

… of course Coke can trash-talk Pepsi and vice-versa… but if I’m making a technical assessment of competing products or software platforms I get a bad feeling of anyone using those sales tactics.

Yeah, but who we protecting? Don't readers want a rigorous debate? Are we pirates or diplomats?

In Germany there are, for examples, rules regarding comparative advertising. Way stronger than anything the US has. Therefore we are not used to competitors trash talking other brands in ads.

So I am in the same boat when it comes to SEO/content marketing like this. It is advertising, nothing more.

And personally, when evaluating products, I agree with OP. I also like the people behind a product to be a bit more humble when comparing themselves to competitors.

That can be true, especially for objective facts, but I would expect such criticism to be biased to the point of unreliability - "We taste better than x (according to our staff)", "we have higher quality than x (at double the price)", "we’re like x but cheaper (and we have nearly 20% of their features)". And even then, as an input there can be value, but it's helpful to at least know that it's coming from a competitor so I can anticipate the bias.