I got a contract with this schools to build a student portal,

I do all the needful and the project whatever guy insists that I use their current shared hosting to host this MERN stack application.

first of all, cPanel is my least favorite place when it comes to deploying, I actually dont do deploying I just hand it over to whoever is the IT guy there.

I discovered there's no provision for nodejs in their current plan, I go through all the stress of contacting the shitty customer support and the process of squeezing out useful information from them.

I'm only doing this because the project whatever has refused to pay me until their site is deployed. throughout the process of creating this project I had setup continous deployment on heroku and netlify and I had to beg this guy to look at the changes and review them.

well, today I asked the former guy that built the current site for the login details to the schools dashboard on the hosting providers site and he says he used his personal details for it, according to him projects from other organizations are there too.

I swear I'm going to loose my shit, freelancing sucks

Heroku/Render

Deploy 2 apps
app #1 sends request to app #2 every minute
app #2 sends request to app #1 every minute
they never sleep
profit?

I'm thinking of self hosting all my small web projects,

I have this old laptop running ubuntu server heedlessly I used to store and stream pirated movies, after multiple embarrassing moments with free backend/platform as a service options and not finding a cheap VPS, this seems like the way to go. I don't get much traffic on these sites i just want them to be available when i need to present them.

then there's tons of other features that are locked behind a paywall,

I once had to store images in the database because heroku wont accept file uploads and the project hadn't been paid, in short, I was dead broke

Social media fact sharing application, currently not working because heroku fucked me over

How to set the up a stagging environment for a github branch in heroku.
Lets say i have a master branch and a dev branch. All the changes and updates first pushed to dev branch and after successful review and test in goes to master branch.
But the issue is as i'm following the gitflow of keeping the master branch always deployable.since my heroku app is linked to the master branch, when i try to test the dev branch in production environment of heroku,sometimes it breaks for some error.and at that time the sites goes down untill i redeploy the master branch as it's the stable version .So how do i test a branch in heroku production environment while also keeping the the site active with master branch. it that makes any sense 🤡 plz help

Sorry, I'm very stupid and know nothing about cloud development.

My need: I have a php code I want to put in cloud and launch as a task every N minutes automatically until I decide to stop it.

What is the best solution to do it, do you know some good services that allows me to do it easily, quickly and affordably?
For ex. "Heroku" allows me to do something like that?

Thanks in advance, I would really like to learn this part of software development I never touched in my life.

P.S. It's not a service I want to put online with access for users, it's just a "script" I want to have running on a server until I'm done.

How to separately host the backend and the frontend ???

I have express API repository which is currently hosted in Heroku along with its documentation site written in ejs.

But now I'm planning on separating the docs website with gatsby and moving it into another repo and hosting it on netlify while the API service still remains in Heroku.

Here is the end goal :
"/" : the docs website.(netlify)
"/api" : the API services.(heroku)

Can someone help me with how to implement this in the actual application?