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Pick your cloud hosting — 14 providers across the five categories that decide most picks

Your hosting choice is your monthly bill, your egress cost, and the operational model your team lives in. The directory filters by Jamstack / PaaS / hyperscaler / VPS / self-hosted, plus pricing, edge-readiness, and free-tier status. Every entry gives you a one-line summary, a concrete best-for, an honest skip-this-if, and a paragraph of opinion.

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Showing 14 of 14

Coolify

Open-source self-hostable PaaS — Heroku / Vercel shape on your own VPS. The 2025 darling.

  • CatSelf-hosted PaaS
  • Stars49.4k
  • PricingOpen source
  • Created2021
Free tier
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Dokku

mature

The original Heroku-style PaaS for self-hosting. Older, simpler, smaller surface than Coolify.

  • CatSelf-hosted PaaS
  • Stars30.7k
  • PricingOpen source
  • Created2013
Free tier
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Vercel

The Next.js company's platform. Zero-config Next.js deploys, edge runtime, generous DX, premium pricing.

  • CatJamstack
  • Starsclosed
  • PricingFreemium
  • Created2015
Edge-ready Free tier Egress costs
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Netlify

Vercel's closer Jamstack competitor. Cleaner pricing, broader framework support, less Next.js-locked.

  • CatJamstack
  • Starsclosed
  • PricingFreemium
  • Created2014
Edge-ready Free tier Egress costs
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Cloudflare Pages

Edge-first Jamstack on Cloudflare's 300+ city network. Cheapest at scale, broader runtime constraints.

  • CatJamstack
  • Starsclosed
  • PricingFreemium
  • Created2020
Edge-ready Free tier Free egress
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Render

Modern Heroku alternative. Web services, background workers, Postgres, Redis, cron — all integrated.

  • CatPaaS
  • Starsclosed
  • PricingFreemium
  • Created2019
Free tier
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Fly.io

Run Docker containers in 30+ regions. Per-region scaling, Postgres included, edge-shaped PaaS.

  • CatPaaS
  • Starsclosed
  • PricingFreemium
  • Created2017
Edge-ready
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Railway

Modern PaaS with the cleanest DX in the category. Per-second pricing, Heroku-style git deploys.

  • CatPaaS
  • Starsclosed
  • PricingPaid
  • Created2020
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Heroku

mature

The original PaaS. Mature, capable, expensive — and still relevant in enterprise.

  • CatPaaS
  • Starsclosed
  • PricingPaid
  • Created2007
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AWS

The biggest cloud. Every service you can imagine, complexity and cost to match. EC2, S3, Lambda, RDS.

  • CatHyperscaler
  • Starsclosed
  • PricingPaid
  • Created2006
Edge-ready Free tier Egress costs
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Google Cloud

Google's cloud. Strong on data, ML, and Kubernetes. Smaller than AWS, more developer-friendly.

  • CatHyperscaler
  • Starsclosed
  • PricingPaid
  • Created2008
Edge-ready Free tier Egress costs
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Microsoft Azure

The Microsoft cloud. Strong in Microsoft-shop enterprises, .NET-aligned, OpenAI integration via Azure OpenAI.

  • CatHyperscaler
  • Starsclosed
  • PricingPaid
  • Created2010
Edge-ready Free tier Egress costs
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Hetzner Cloud

European VPS provider with shockingly cheap dedicated machines. The cost-leader of cloud hosting.

  • CatVPS / app platform
  • Starsclosed
  • PricingPaid
  • Created2017
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DigitalOcean

Developer-friendly cloud with App Platform, Droplets, Managed Databases. Heroku-shape PaaS optional.

  • CatVPS / app platform
  • Starsclosed
  • PricingPaid
  • Created2011
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The hosting choice is the easy half — your bill at scale is the hard one

Picking the host is the easy half. The hard half is the bandwidth bill at 1M page views, the egress cost when you migrate, and the platform-lock that comes with every bundled service. The 30-min call is the right starting place — describe your traffic shape, your stack, your budget; I tell you what fits without surprising you in month 4.