Guides · How to Choose

How to Choose a Hosting Tool

Your hosting platform shapes your deployment workflow, cold-start latency, egress costs, and long-term portability. A PaaS that feels easy at launch can become a pricing trap at scale — or the right abstraction that lets you ship faster indefinitely.

Key questions to ask

? Serverless vs container vs VM — what matches your traffic patterns?
? Cold start tolerance — are your users sensitive to first-request latency?
? Lock-in risk — can you migrate if pricing changes at scale?
? Team expertise — does your team already know this platform well?

Compare 11 hosting options

Tool	Pricing	Best For
AWS	Pay-as-you-go	Complex infra, enterprise workloads, global scale
Cloudflare Pages	Free tier — unlimited bandwidth, paid from $20/mo	Static sites, edge-rendered apps, high-traffic sites needing unlimited free bandwidth
Cloudflare Workers	Freemium — 100k requests/day free, paid $5/mo for 10M requests	Edge APIs, low-latency middleware, globally distributed serverless functions
Fly.io	Pay-as-you-go — no free tier for new accounts, from ~$2/mo	Low-latency global apps, real-time services
Google Cloud	Pay-as-you-go	Data-heavy apps, ML workloads, Kubernetes deployments
Microsoft Azure	Pay-as-you-go	Enterprise workloads, Microsoft-first teams, hybrid cloud
Netlify	Freemium — free tier forever, Personal $9/mo, Pro $20/member/mo	Static sites, JAMstack, frontend projects
Railway	Pay-as-you-go — from ~$5/mo	Full-stack apps, databases, background workers
Render	Freemium — free tier for static, from $7/mo	Full-stack apps, managed Postgres, background jobs
Replicate	Pay-per-prediction	Running open-source models, quick ML prototypes
Vercel	Freemium — generous hobby tier, from $20/mo	Next.js, React, frontend-first apps