Sblurp

Render

Render runs the server image for you. There is no operating system to patch. One community costs about $7.25 a month.

Caveats

  • Do not use the Free instance type. Free services stop after 15 minutes without traffic, and they cannot have a disk. Without a disk, every restart deletes your community.
  • One instance only. A service with a disk cannot scale past one instance. This is correct for SQLite, which allows one writer.
  • Short downtime on each deploy. With a disk, Render stops the old instance before it starts the new one. Expect a few seconds of downtime. Clients reconnect by themselves.
  • HTTP/1.1 to the server. Render's proxy speaks HTTP/2 to clients but HTTP/1.1 to your service. The Sblurp apps use Connect, which streams over HTTP/1.1, so they work. A native gRPC client does not.
  • Streams end after 100 minutes. Render closes any request after 100 minutes. Clients open a new Subscribe stream and resume from where they stopped.

Steps

  1. In the Render dashboard, click New and then Web Service. Select Existing image and enter:

    ghcr.io/OWNER/sblurp-server:stable

    The tag picks a track: stable, beta, nightly or a pinned version.

  2. Select the Starter instance type, or a larger one.

  3. Add these environment variables. Change the name and the URL:

    PORT=8080
SBLURP_NAME=My Community
SBLURP_BASE_URL=https://chat.example.com
SBLURP_TRUSTED_ISSUERS=https://sblurp.chat

  4. Under Advanced, add a disk. Set the mount path to /data and the size to 1 GB.

  5. Set the health check path to /healthz.

  6. Click Deploy Web Service.

  7. In Settings, add your custom domain, such as chat.example.com. Add the CNAME record that Render shows. Render gets the certificate.

  8. Join your community first. The first person to join becomes the owner.

Every setting is listed in Configuration.

Backups on Render

Render takes a daily snapshot of the disk. To also copy the data off Render, add the R2 values as environment variables before the first deploy:

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=<R2 access key ID>
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=<R2 secret access key>
R2_ENDPOINT=https://<ACCOUNT_ID>.r2.cloudflarestorage.com
R2_BUCKET=sblurp-backups
BACKUP_PASSWORD=<backup password>
BACKUP_NAME=my-community

See Backups for what gets copied and how to restore.

Updates

Render does not pull a new image by itself. To update, click Manual Deploy and then Deploy latest reference. You can also call the service's deploy hook URL from a script.

Cost

Checked on 2026-10-17:

  • Starter instance, 512 MB and 0.5 CPU: $7 a month.
  • Disk: $0.25 per GB a month, so $0.25 for 1 GB.
  • The Hobby workspace plan is free.

That is about $7.25 a month for one community. Check render.com/pricing for current prices.

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