I am new to Retool and I am trying to figure out if cloud or self-hosting is best for my project. My client will have lots of media (mostly images) and will need a lot of storage. Does anyone know if I use external database and storage with Retool cloud will I still have limitations using Retool Cloud even if I do not use Retools database and storage?
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Hi there @JO315, and welcome to the forum!
So, you could use something like supabase which provides both S3 storage and a postgres database, and this is actually best practice for production-ready apps than using retool's db and storage.
You can connect to these type of storage solutions using cloud really quickly, and I don't see any reason for this to need self-hosting.
Are there any regulatory or compliance requirements that you need to meet? This may have weight on whether to go self-hosting or stay on cloud.
Best,
Miguel
Hello and thank you for the warm welcome!
Interesting. I built the MVP for my client using Retool Cloud and Supabase! My clients best estimate on storage needs will likely fall somewhere between 3 – 4TB. They have an extensive image library. I just need to be sure that one month from now when I am deep in development I will not need to migrate my app to a self-hosting option.
Thanks in advance
Hi @JO315! As @MiguelOrtiz aptly mentioned, using Supabase with Retool Cloud is absolutely scalable.
Unless there are regulatory or security reasons to manage your own infrastructure then we wouldn't recommend self-hosted. The extra effort involved in setting up a self-hosted environment is a major caveat for some. On the other hand, your organization could be comfortable with that and just prefer to have that level of control, and that's ok too, but again not our recommendation.