Private Services

Render private services are just like web services, with one exception: private services aren’t reachable via the public internet. They do not receive an onrender.com subdomain:

Render
Web service
Private
service
External clients
(browsers, etc.)

However, private services are reachable by your other Render services on the same private network! This means they’re perfect for services that your own infrastructure needs to talk to, but that external clients never do.

Private services can listen on any port and communicate using any protocol.

Examples

Here are some deployment guides for tools that make great private services:

Private service or background worker?

Like private services, your background workers are unreachable via the public internet. Unlike private services, background workers aren’t even reachable via their private network:

Render
Web service
Private
service
Background
worker
  • If your internal service will bind to at least one port and receive private network traffic, create a private service.
  • Otherwise, create a background worker.

Background workers can send outbound requests to other service types on your private network. They usually perform long-running or resource-intensive tasks, which they fetch from a queue that’s usually backed by a Redis instance.

Connect to your private service

See Private Network Communication.