Hi folks, as mentioned in today’s blog post, we’ve been preparing a list of suggested platforms that we’ve tested migrating Glitch projects to. It’s almost ready, but in the meantime, we wanted to provide a focused space for the community to share things they’re thinking about doing and (once the guide is available) give feedback on anything that might need improvements.
I’ve been taking a look at a few myself for my own projects and now have some stuff on GitHub and DigitalOcean but I haven’t kept up with all the cool new options. Does anyone want to start things off with a platform they can recommend?
so i’ve been using digital ocean’s app platform to deploy my 4 main static sites (personal, store, blog, make8bitart) because it comes with custom domain management that’s been extremely stable. it’s free for the first 3 static sites and then $3/month for every static site after that. i have the sites deploy when i merge changes into their respective github repos - but if anyone can recommend version control that’s not trying to force feed me AI, pls let me know.
i now have the daunting feat of speedrunning through several hundred apps made over the last 9 years because the fastly council of elders couldn’t even give us a week for each year the platform’s been running BUT i will go through each one! because i am not warren buffett and/or jd rockefeller in this economy, i will not be deploying every single site - instead i’m trying out a /glitch subdirectory on my personal site to move the apps i want live there; for example, i’ve already moved ~candlemakinginventory. i’ll miss the ability to edit in a portable live environment on glitch, but i’ve been enjoying using nova locally.
if i hit any node apps i absolutely need alive, i’ll probably just deploy a droplet running node and do a similar multi-app setup there - but i don’t think i’m going to need an active node container up in that way. if anyone has a recommendation for a way to run, for example, a bluesky bot for free, i’d love to know!
We’re really close to publishing some guides but I want to quickly mention here that for static sites, Netlify is literally a breeze. I could not believe how easy it was to download a project from Glitch and drag it into their UI. And since those are the only types of apps I create that’s most likely what I’ll be doing with my Glitch side projects.
Waiting eagerly to see what people are doing about their Node hosting. I can easily move static sites over as subsites of my Netlify. For active Node hosting, I am a bit container skeptic, so not too sure about Fly.io and its ilk. I’m interested in whether DO is a good fit, but I may just get better value for money on some solid shared hosting that supports Node, right?
I’m a cheapskate so I’d hope to transfer my 10 or so most valuable Glitch Node sites over to something costing me less than £5/mo total
yeah I’ve not found any good options for node apps that also have persistent storage. a VPS has good pricing but then I have to learn to manage a server which I have worked hard to avoid.
i personally use Render.com for all of my projects. you can have 1 node app online 24/7 through one account (if you ping it). it’s also pretty similar to glitch in it’s static sites and can deploy from github.
I used to use digital ocean for some small work projects and I hated how bulky and involved the site was. hosting node apps on glitch was as easy as doing it from my computer and they just worked. I haven’t had to set up or deploy a project in years and frankly I’m not sure I remember how. really really hoping someone comes up with a replacement that lets me rehost without going back to school to remember how
Unfortunately, not much is free anymore… I’m switching over to VPSs.
For hosting Ill be using: https://www.ionos.com/ Super cheap, unmetered bandwidth, a lot of storage. Probably the closest thing you’ll find to glitch. Will take a bit of know-how if you’ve only ever used glitch before, but youtube tutorials would probably suffice.
For domain/dns management Ill be using cloudflare which does 95% of the work for you.
Theoretically, if you wanted to keep all your projects alive, you could just throw em all on one vps and have it spin up an instance whenever its requested. Kind of like how glitch works now (I feel something premade that does this already should have been provided…)
yeah I’m not worried about it being free, I just don’t want to have to relearn how to deploy stuff from a cli again or worry about all the nuanced stuff that doesn’t matter for a tiny node app, I just need it to be live all the time
Hiya, I wish I had easier options to share but well, there’s a reason I’ve used Glitch for education projects all these years (and through several jobs lol). That said, I’ve been exploring other platforms recently and am feeling more optimistic about enabling folk to make the web than I’d have expected right now..!
On the Fastly front I can share some resources that I hope might be helpful. If you have a static site, like Hello Website, Hello Eleventy, a Glitch in Bio, or even a Hello React remix, you can deploy that entirely to Fastly Compute and serve it to your users from the edge without using a separate hosting service. You just need a free Fastly developer account to grab an API key from.
We know onboarding to Fastly isn’t as easy as other platforms and want to fix that. My coworkers created a Static Publisher tool for deploying sites to Fastly Compute. You can use the tool directly yourself on static Glitch projects you’ve downloaded, but I’ve been working on a migration resource that I hope will make the experience a bit smoother for anyone who would like to try a Fastly deploy…
All of this is part of us figuring out what a great onboarding flow for deploying to Fastly would look like. On that note I’ve also been experimenting with container configs to make a more Glitch-like experience in GitHub Codespaces and have used some of that work for the migration tool.
It’s extremely WIP and will absolutely break, it’s also a wee bit awkward to use tbqh! I’d love suggestions on making the flow better and supporting more Glitch apps, so please share either here or in the repo. You’re of course welcome to amend it to use other deploy targets (GitHub Pages is fairly straightforward from the Codespace and you can use Actions for other platforms from there too).
The MIGRATE.md doc has the steps in it – feel free to create or comment on the issues.
Thank you for all the tips and utilities for project download bcs I don’t even want to think about all the daft personal projects I’ve made on Glitch over the years yet.
I’m unavailable for most of Fri so there might be a delay in me responding to any queries, but I will get back to you when I can.
Just popping in to share that we have the first set of migration guides available on the Glitch Help Center. So if you were looking for advice on how to migrate your 11ty blog, static-site or full-stack site, please check those out. I’ll share more updates as we add them, thank you!
Following up on my post in main announcement thread: does anyone know of a platform, that will apart from hosting also have online live editor and preferably an easy, browser-based way to upload assets? Those are my main advantages of Glitch and most of the alternatives are suited to far more advanced users than my students.
i havent found a perfect match, but https://vscode.dev/ / https://github.dev/ has been the most promising option i can find (for working with static sites online - but alas, no live preview)
Currently, they will only be available until July 8th as well. If for some reason that were to change, we will absolutely notify the community, but to be on the safe side use that date as your target.
that’s most likely what I’ll be doing with my Glitch side projects. 
It’s extremely WIP and will absolutely break, it’s also a wee bit awkward to use tbqh! I’d love suggestions on making the flow better and supporting more Glitch apps, so please share either here or in the repo. You’re of course welcome to amend it to use other deploy targets (GitHub Pages is fairly straightforward from the Codespace and you can use Actions for other platforms from there too).
The 
Thank you for all the tips and utilities for project download bcs I don’t even want to think about all the daft personal projects I’ve made on Glitch over the years yet. 
I’m unavailable for most of Fri so there might be a delay in me responding to any queries, but I will get back to you when I can.