Serverless products like Firebase App Hosting let you deploy applications fast, without managing the infrastructure yourself. Among Google solutions, App Hosting is the best choice for Web developers creating modern Web apps on Next.js or Angular Web frameworks because it manages the full stack, from the CDN to server-side rendering.
However, App Hosting is only one of several Google serverless products. Depending on the nature of your app or your scalability needs, you might choose App Hosting or one of these other products:
- Cloud Run: Best for running backend services in containers with maximum configurability.
- Cloud Functions: Best for quickly creating single-purpose, event-driven functions.
- Cloud Functions for Firebase: Like Cloud Functions, but with a simplified model for easier integration with other Firebase features like Realtime Database or Cloud Firestore.
- Firebase App Hosting: Ideal for hosting modern frameworks-based Web apps with server-side rendering (SSR) or generative AI features.
- Firebase Hosting : Excellent for hosting static assets like websites and images.
Regarding cost, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, and Firebase App Hosting require a billing account to get started, include a no-cost tier for small deployments, and are priced based on usage. Firebase Hosting offers a no-cost tier with no billing account required for small deployments, with flexibility to expand as your app scales up.
App Hosting and Firebase Hosting
App Hosting is not a drop-in replacement for Firebase Hosting – it fills a specific gap. If you are developing a dynamic, server-rendered web app with SSR on Angular or Next.js, App Hosting is definitely for you. If you want hosting for a static website or single-page app, it may make sense to use the original Hosting to optimize for cost and performance.
Since App Hosting and Firebase Hosting have a degree of overlap in the features they support, a more detailed look may be helpful.
| Feature | Hosting | App Hosting (at public preview) |
|---|---|---|
| Automatic deployment of server-rendered Angular and Next.js apps | Experimental | Yes |
| Request timeout | 1m | 5m |
| Cache timeout | 1hr | 1m |
| Stale-While-Revalidate cache control | No | Yes |
| Terms of Service | Firebase | Cloud |
| Static content origin replicas | 3 | N/A |
| Dynamic content regions | 3 | 1 |
| Continuous deployment | Limited | Built-in |
| Build process | Local environment | Reproducible environment |
| Preview content | Yes | No |
| Fault tolerance | Global outage | Regional outage |
| Emulator | Yes | No |
Once App Hosting transitions from public preview status to general availability, many of these feature areas will expand and improve.
Development lifecycle features of App Hosting and Hosting
Firebase App Hosting is deeply integrated with GitHub and offers efficient rollouts to production for your app. When you push a change to your live branch, App Hosting builds the branch in a reproducible Cloud Build environment. Then, in the App Hosting dashboard UI, you can track each version of your web app to the exact commit it was built with, so that you know which changes were live at a certain time.
Firebase Hosting also provides a degree of integration using GitHub actions to create preview channels and deploy to live channel in response to actions in a repository.
Apps deployed using the frameworks experiment in the Firebase CLI
For Next.js or Angular apps deployed to Firebase Hosting using the frameworks experiment in the Firebase CLI, we recommend "graduating" to App Hosting. With App Hosting, you'll have a unified solution to manage everything from CDN to server-side rendering, along with improved GitHub integration.
If you used the experimental CLI to deploy other types of apps, such as Flutter or Vite, you can continue using these apps without modification or migration.