It's easy to spin up containers locally. However, if you want to deploy them it can be a bit intimidating. But the hosting landscape drastically changed in recent years — now there are plenty of options available that make hosting containers simple. Let's look at 5 different options ranked by complexity, starting with the easiest way to deploy your containers!
At a glance - ordered by simplicity:
- Sliplane provides the easiest solution for deploying containerized applications at a reasonable price.
- Render offers advanced scaling features and is also simple and straightforward to use, but it comes at a premium price point.
- Digital Ocean's App Platform can be seen as a middleground between Sliplane and Render in terms of simplicity, pricing and scalability.
- Coolify simplifies hosting containers on virtual private servers. It's open source and therefore a cheap option but on the other hand requires some ongoing maintenance effort.
- Hetzner provides plain virtual private servers - it offers the most flexibility, but also requires the most setup and maintenance effort
1. Sliplane
Sliplane is arguably one of the easiest ways to deploy containerized applications. It's a European hosting platform focused on one thing and one thing only: containers.
You can quickly spin up containers from a registry like Docker Hub or GitHub Container Registry or build and deploy your own code directly from a GitHub repository.
- attach persistent volumes
- automatic daily volume backups
- automatic build and deployment pipelines
- secrets management
- custom domains
- SSL
- and much more...
One of the key selling points is the fact that you don't pay extra for every service that you deploy. Instead, you pay per server and you can deploy as much as your server can handle.
If you are looking for a simple and cost-effective way to deploy your containers with minimal overhead, Sliplane is the way to go.
2. Render
Looking at simplicity, Render is a great option as well — it comes with an intuitive UI to make deploying containers buttery smooth.
Additionally, Render offers some advanced scaling features that allow you to handle huge traffic and also offers additional features like fully managed databases, for example.
The main difference in comparison to Sliplane: the price point.
While Render is also very simple to use and abstracts many of the infrastructure-level tasks, it comes at a premium price point. Depending on your configuration, compute, storage, and bandwidth costs can be up to 10x higher than Sliplane's, and you will be charged extra for collaborators.
3. DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is a classic. They provide a wide range of services from bare metal to managed Kubernetes to their fully managed App Platform that you can use to deploy containers.
Looking at simplicity, App Platform is their easiest product to get started. It's a higher-level abstraction on top of Kubernetes and can be categorized as the middle ground between Sliplane and Render.
In comparison to Render, DigitalOcean's App Platform is cheaper but lacks some convenience features here and there, although the differences are nuanced.
Compared to Sliplane, DigitalOcean's App Platform is more expensive but has more advanced scaling features. A key differentiator is Sliplane's focus on containers, which makes the transition from local development to deploying the container more seamless, while you might have to spend a thought more about how to wrap your app in DigitalOcean concepts.
4. Coolify
Coolify is an open-source PaaS. As stated on the website, it's a self-hostable alternative to popular commercial PaaS providers like the three mentioned above. In addition to the self-hosted version, they also provide a managed plan for Coolify.
The big difference: you bring your own servers. This means you can rent virtual private servers from a cloud provider of choice and Coolify handles the deployments.
The big benefit: it's cheap! You can rent a powerful VPS from $5 per month and only pay for the compute resources. In addition to that, you get full control over your servers and you can reduce third-party dependencies.
The downside: you still need to manage these servers — keep the operating system up to date, install the latest patches and make sure to keep them secure. While Coolify is a big improvement in comparison to a plain VPS, the setup and maintenance are still more complicated compared to a fully managed PaaS.
5. Hetzner
Hetzner is a cloud provider that is known for cheap and reliable infrastructure. They provide virtual private servers with a great price-to-performance ratio.
When it comes to deploying Docker containers, using a plain VPS is still a great choice.
To be fair, it's not the easiest way to deploy a container, but it gives you the flexibility that you need to deploy anything.
Compute prices are unbeatable, but you're trading time for money.
You can use our affiliate link to get a 20€ discount.
Summary
Sliplane is aguably the easiest way to get your containers running in the cloud for an affordable price. Render and Digital Ocean are also great managed solutions, they are more scalable but more expensive and don't have the same focus on containers as Sliplane. Coolify is an honorable mention, as an affordable open source option. If you want full control, I recommend Hetzner as a VPS provider.
Disclaimer: The options listed above have been carefully handpicked by a human and are carefully chosen. I do get a kickback from Hetzner if you signup through the link and as a co-founder, I'm biased with Sliplane.
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