Devlog: Fixing the Deployment

After submitting NihonGo!, I found out that Render was not an accepted deployment option for this project. I also realized that Render’s free tier can put services to sleep after periods of inactivity, which is not ideal for a project that reviewers and users need to test reliably.

To fix this, I migrated the deployment away from Render:

• Moved the frontend deployment to Vercel
• Moved the backend API deployment to Vercel
• Switched the production database to Neon PostgreSQL
• Updated the frontend environment variable to point to the new Vercel backend
• Updated the backend CORS settings to allow the new Vercel frontend URL
• Fixed the backend serverless deployment configuration for Vercel
• Added the PostgreSQL dialect module explicitly so Sequelize works correctly in Vercel’s serverless environment
• Re-ran the production migrations and seeders on the new database
• Tested account registration and the main app flow again after the migration

The main reason for this change was reliability. Since Render can make free services inactive when there is no traffic for a while, the app could appear broken or slow when someone tries to test it later. Moving the app to Vercel and Neon makes the project easier to access, test, and review.

The new deployment is now working correctly, with the frontend, backend, database, authentication, and CORS all connected again.