Hetzner, Sliplane, Render, Github, DigitalOcean - Picking a hosting provider for your next side project can be challenging, especially with all the awesome options available. Analysis Paralysis is real 😵💫. Who wins the race for the cheapest cloud provider?
1. Hetzner
Hetzner is a German Cloud Provider with Locations in Europe and North America, with a wide variety of compute options including ARM, dedicated, and shared servers. Hetzner is loved by developers, with 70% saying that they want to continue using them according to the latest Stackoverflow survey. Hetzner provides incredibly cheap but at the same time basic servers.
2. Sliplane
What if you could combine the awesome price of Hetzner with the ease of a PaaS like Heroku, Render, or Vercel? Sliplane is a PaaS on top that gives you push-to-deploy, automatic SSL, a free domain, and more for your Docker apps. Connect your GitHub account and get started in less than 5 minutes for free. Sliplane lets you host an unlimited number of Docker Apps on your server, making it incredibly cheap if you have a large number of low-traffic apps.
Disclaimer: I'm the co-founder 🤫
3. GitHub Actions
This one is a bit unconventional, but hear me out! I'm building many projects that need to run on a schedule for a short time. For example, I have a scraper that summarizes news every morning at 7 AM and sends me an audio message that I then listen to. This scraper runs for ~5 minutes every day, and using a dedicated server for it would be wasteful. So instead, I simply created a GitHub Action that runs my code on a schedule. While this doesn't work for everything, and especially not for something that needs to be 100% reliable, sometimes it's worth it to think outside of the box to save some bucks 🤑
4. Digital Ocean
DigitalOcean is another hosting provider that is loved by developers and has grown tremendously in the last few years. At this point, Digital Ocean provides simple computing services, as well as databases, serverless functions, object storage, and a basic PaaS solution. While it might not win in a 1:1 price comparison, DigitalOcean provides many different services with a better DX than AWS. You should check out their App Platform for a quick solution to your hosting needs :)
5. Render
Last but not least, another PaaS provider that I want to mention is Render. While Render might look expensive at first, the "Zero DevOps cloud" really makes up for it by being the simplest solution in this list while also providing generous free tiers for most services (including websites, APIs, and databases!). In the end, the price that your VPS costs is not everything, you also need to consider the time you are putting in to keep everything running! Sometimes a $20 database is cheaper than a $5 database if you need to work 10 hours less per month, just keep that in mind :)
Conclusion
I hope you learned something new, and always keep in mind to include the price of your own sanity when checking out prices!
Also, I'd love to know where you are hosting your Docker apps. What features do you love, and which do you dislike? Let's discuss it!
Top comments (16)
I've been using digital ocean for a few years now. It's been good. However I've struggled with the logging sometimes.
Sometimes builds fail and I found recently I got a lot of lack of memory but it took a while to debug that and find the message.
However, it's great to connect to GitHub and it will deploy when pushed to master but that's pretty standard I guess.
So you are using the App Platform, and not Droplets? How does the pricing work for you?
I used droplets, I'm not sure about if there's a difference in pricing.
I pay $5 a month for 1 droplet. I started by using $200 credit such as my link - to try it out - m.do.co/c/b6731a07428c and continued using for 2 years now.
Caprover on a Contabo VPS
Oh yeah! Totally forgot about contabo, I actually used to host with them in ~2016 I think. Need to check them out again :)
How has your experience been with them, especially around reliability?
Rock solid (the only outage I had in years was self-inflicted, silly me), awesome support and always friendly. Really can't say anything bad about them.
Glad to hear that!
I have been using Fly.io
Although the configurations take more than a few minutes but it very affordable with a lot of options for regions. Also provide postgreSQL DB.
Fly.io is pretty awesome, I really hope it works out for them, especially after their reliability issues. I loved how transparent they were!
not even dev.to is free from these crappy listicle SEO advertisements -_-
I'm building dockerdeploy.cloud. It's an option between managing a VPS and going to DigitalOcean. You can host Docker images or docker compose files for little money.
The pricing:
welcome to the club, I'm building sliplane.io :)
For more options to host Docker, a list of well-known and reputed providers can be checked here : alterwebhosts.com/cheap-docker-hos...
Any thoughts on Render vs Fly vs Railway?/O settled on the last one but I don't know if I'm missing out
I tried all of them, but only used render in production. I really like the simplicity of render, although it does get quite expensive once you need some beefier hardware