PHP, PHP, PHP, InfinityFree, 000webhost (dead) and many, many others. If you want to find an excellent PHP hosting, you will eventually find it. I personally use InfinityFree to host my imageboard. But the sad truth is that no one uses React anymore.
I have written on my blog about this before (read the full article here). PHP is abandanoned and now Javascript is the king. It makes sense everyone wants a NodeJS hosting, right?
Vercel... Excellent NodeJS hosting, right? NOPE! It only runs a build process and it disallows anything like npm start. That means you need to host a website.
Yeah, that's the primary reason you want to use NodeJS hosting, right? NOPE! Yes, I agree that the primary reason to use hosting platforms is to build various websites. But they did it wrong. You see... you can't even host a backend for your website. And that's the reason to even use PHP in the first place. It's like calling something an innovation, where in reality it's objectivelly worse. But use it! Use it! It's innovative. (sarcasm)
Static sites are fine!
Yes, but compare a small project with a database to a personal website. It's like comparing a computer to a fridge. The first one and the second one is an electronic device. But they have a different role and they work different(ly). While Neocities, static web hosting is fine for a personal website, it's the worst thing you could choose when building a small forum.
NodeJS is commonly used for making websites. But it's not all it's capable of. It can for example:
NodeJS is not just React, Vue, Next.JS, [put your framework's name here]. If you go to NodeJS's website, you don't see "A Modern and Safe PHP Successor With Package Management Done Right". You instead see "Run JavaScript, everywhere". Even NodeJS claims that its only goal is not to serve websites.
So you know I love TypeScript.
You have to compile it. Do you think 0.5 gigs of RAM is enough to compile TypeScript in two hours? NOPE!
Pterodactyl Daemon: out of memory: true
Pterodactyl Daemon: Not attempting to restart the server. Last crash occured less than 60 seconds ago.
Okay, just leave it without a comment.
Okay, most of the packages don't even install properly on hostings like pella.bot, even though I mannually selected them to be installed. And there are no logs why the installation failed. They just aren't there.
In most cases I was able to get my dependencies to work only because of esbuild. I needed to put every dependency in the same file as my application. AND I needed to exclude & install some packages that don't work with esbuild. Why is it made like that? The packages are a pain and you need to figure out what works for you. Believe me, if you had problems with packages on your computer, you'll also have them on teh hosting side.