After writing the first one I promptly forgot about this and failed to update the week after, but I was on holiday so I think I can let myself off. A lot about hosting platforms this week.

• Google Cloud Platform I’ve always wanted an excuse to use GCP and I finally found one with a personal project I’ve been working on. I needed somewhere to host and run a Go backend that connects to a PostgreSQL database. A few teething troubles, mostly due to some unfamiliarity with Go and GCP specifically but this is why I do these things to keep learning. This also gave another good excuse to get back into Docker again.
• Vercel Since I went through the Next.js tutorial and Vercel seemed fairly decent for hobby hosting it seemed only fair to keep going with things. I initially used this for my Go backend (keeping things close to the frontend and database) but serverless didn’t quite fit my needs right now.
• Neon This was quite cool to discover. I had some issues connecting to my Vercel hosted PostgreSQL database and found out that behind the scenes they’re using Neon. The Vercel documentation on hosted databases is a bit rubbish, but the Neon documentation is excellent and was a good test to see if it was a hosting issue or a me issue. It ended up being a me issue with my local network but at least I now know Neon exists for a great place to put some hobby databases.