Render Cold Start Prevention Guide
For developers using Render's free and starter plans.
Why do Render apps sleep?
Render explicitly puts free tier web services to sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity to conserve resources. Waking them can take 30+ seconds, creating poor user experience.
Does Render offer official ways to prevent sleep?
No. Unlike Heroku's deprecated "hobby dyno" upgrade, Render doesn't offer an official free way to prevent sleep. Paid plans ($7+/month) automatically stay awake.
How does Keep Alive prevent Render sleep?
Keep Alive sends HTTP requests to your Render app before the 15-minute inactivity threshold, preventing sleep mode activation. Configure:
- 10-minute ping intervals for reliable coverage
- Health check endpoints that perform minimal processing
- Optional secondary endpoints if your app has multiple services
Setup guide
- Create a lightweight health endpoint in your Render app returning 200 OK
- Add your app URL to Keep Alive
- Set ping interval to 10 minutes (conservative) or 12 minutes (aggressive)
- Verify your app never enters sleep state via response time monitoring
Does this affect my Render usage limits?
No. Render's free tier limits are based on compute hours and bandwidth, not request count. Keep Alive's small pings have negligible impact on bandwidth quotas.
Best practices for Render apps
- Endpoint efficiency: Create a lightweight health endpoint that performs minimal work
- Static assets: Use Render's CDN for static assets to reduce load
- Database connections: Ensure your health endpoint doesn't create unnecessary database connections
- Resource usage: Monitor CPU/memory usage to stay within free tier limits
Render vs other platforms
While Render's 15-minute sleep policy is restrictive compared to some platforms, Keep Alive completely mitigates this limitation:
- Render: 15 minutes → Always awake with Keep Alive
- Heroku: 30 minutes + 6hr quota → Partially mitigated with Keep Alive
- Lambda: No explicit sleep policy, but containers recycle → Fully mitigated