---
title: "Always-on hosting for $10 a month in 2026: no cold starts, no sleeping apps | Pethost"
description: "About $10 a month keeps one 512 MB service always on at Render or Heroku. On Pethost €9.99 rents a 3 GB machine where nothing sleeps: room for six."
---

[Blog](https://pethost.dev/blog/) · Flat-price hosting

# Always-on hosting for $10 a month in 2026: no cold starts, no sleeping apps

By the Pethost team · 1 October 2026 · Updated 5 October 2026 · 10 min read

You have a hobby app, a bot or a small API, and you want it to answer at once: no cold starts, no sleeping, for about $10 a month. In October 2026 that money keeps one always-on service of 512 MB at Render or Heroku, two at Railway before CPU, three at Fly.io in Ashburn. On Pethost, €9.99 a month rents a whole machine of 2 vCPU and 3 GB where nothing sleeps: room for six such services.

**In short**

- **What sleeps:** Render's free web services after 15 minutes, Heroku's Eco dynos after 30, Koyeb's free instance after an hour. Google Cloud Run and a `fly launch` app on Fly.io stop when idle by default. On Pethost nothing does: there is no free tier.
- **What about $10 buys:** one always-on service of 512 MB at Render or Heroku, at $7 each, and three at Fly.io in Ashburn, at $3.69. On Pethost €9.99 ($11.19) is a machine of 2 vCPU, 3 GB and 30 GB: room for six.
- **Starter's 3 GB at the platforms' prices:** $20.10 at Fly.io, $30 at Railway, $39 at Render, $42 at Heroku.
- **A Telegram bot that polls** needs a process that never stops: on Pethost, one more container.

## What sleeps, and after how long: free tiers and scale to zero in 2026

An app sleeps for one of two reasons. Its free tier stops what nobody visits, or its platform scales to zero by default and staying awake has a price.

**What sleeps on each host, and what stays awake, October 2026**

| Host | What sleeps, and when | What stays awake, a month |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Pethost | Nothing: there is no free tier | The whole machine: €9.99 for 2 vCPU and 3 GB |
| Render | Free web services, after 15 minutes without inbound traffic | $7 for 512 MB |
| Heroku | Eco dynos, web and worker together, after 30 minutes without web traffic | A Basic dyno: $7 for 0.5 GB |
| Fly.io | Idle Machines of an app made with `fly launch` | $3.69 for 512 MB in Ashburn |
| Google Cloud Run | Every service without traffic, by default | A minimum instance: $9.72 for 1 vCPU and 512 MiB |
| Koyeb | The free instance, after 1 hour without traffic | $2.68 for 512 MB, on the $29 Pro plan |
| Railway | Only a service with Serverless turned on | $5 of memory for 512 MB, CPU on top |
| DigitalOcean App Platform | Nothing by default | $5 for 512 MiB |
| Northflank | Nothing. Its free Sandbox is two services on limited compute, not for production | $5.40 for 512 MB |
| Sliplane | Nothing | The server: €9 for 1 GB |
| Hostim.dev | Nothing | One app: €2.50 for 1 GB; each further app is one more plan |

Cloud Run's figure is an idle instance at us-central1 rates, before its allowance of $5.22 a month. Heroku lists no free dyno: see [Heroku alternatives](https://pethost.dev/blog/heroku-alternatives/). Koyeb no longer takes new accounts on its free plan.

### The first request waits

A sleeping app starts on a request, and that request waits: a cold start of about a minute on Render's free tier.

### A bot that polls stops asking

A bot that polls sends requests and receives none. Render measures idleness by inbound traffic, so a free web service that runs such a bot is spun down after 15 minutes.

### A cron job never fires

A scheduler inside the app ticks only while the process runs. If the service is asleep at 03:00, the nightly job does not run, and nothing reports it.

## What about $10 a month buys always on

Give every host the same money, €9.99 or $11.19, and count the services of 512 MB it keeps running all month.

**Always-on services of 512 MB for €9.99 a month, or $11.19 at €1 = $1.1204, the ECB's reference rate of 5 October 2026**

| Host | Services kept awake |
| --- | --- |
| Pethost Starter | 6 services |
| Hostim.dev | 4 services |
| Fly.io, Ashburn | 3 services |
| Railway, memory alone | 2 services |
| DigitalOcean | 2 services |
| Northflank | 2 services |
| Sliplane | 2 services |
| Render | 1 service |
| Heroku | 1 service |
| Cloud Run | 1 service |
| Koyeb | 0 services |

Counted by us at each vendor's listed price. Pethost's six are 3 GB divided by 512 MB. Hostim.dev's four are four apps, each on its own plan of 1 GB, for €10.00. Fly.io's three are $11.07; in Frankfurt two fit. Railway's two are $10 of memory: each 0.1 vCPU a service uses adds $2, and then one fits. Koyeb's Pro plan is $29 a month before the first instance.

Hostim.dev prices every app on its own, so a dozen small bots there are twelve plans: €30.00 by our sum. On Starter a dozen small sites, bots or scripts are still €9.99, because [the machine is the price](https://pethost.dev/blog/unlimited-projects-flat-monthly-fee/).

**Six projects, one machine.** Each card has the project's address, its requests of the last day and the state of its services.

![The Pethost panel's first page: the machine's CPU, memory and disk, and six projects as cards, each with its name, its address, its requests of the last day and its services.](https://pethost.dev/shots/projects.webp)

### Render: $7 a month for each always-on instance

A paid Render instance does not spin down. The $7 one, which people look up as Render's Starter, is listed by its size: 512 MB and less than 1 CPU. A background worker costs the same, and only a web service can be free. So a site and a bot are $14, and three sites, a bot, a Postgres and 10 GB of traffic are $34.75 a month; on Starter they take about 2.5 GB of the 3 GB, for €9.99. See [Render alternatives](https://pethost.dev/blog/render-alternatives/).

### Railway's Hobby plan: always on, billed by usage

Hobby is a $5 monthly minimum that includes $5 of usage, and nothing sleeps unless you turn Serverless on. Memory is $10 a gigabyte a month and CPU $20 a vCPU: a service that holds 512 MB uses $5 of memory, and each 0.1 vCPU it averages adds $2. The hard spending limit, from $10, takes every workload offline when it is reached: [PaaS with no usage-based billing](https://pethost.dev/blog/paas-without-usage-based-billing/) compares the caps.

### Fly.io: what a shared-cpu-1x Machine costs left running

Fly.io has no free tier. A shared-cpu-1x Machine left running all month in Ashburn is $2.19 with 256 MB, $3.69 with 512 MB and $6.70 with 1 GB; Frankfurt is 15.4% more. An app made with `fly launch` stops idle Machines until `min_machines_running` is 1. [Railway vs Render vs Fly.io pricing](https://pethost.dev/blog/railway-vs-render-vs-fly-io-pricing/) compares all three.

## Where to host a Telegram bot that runs 24/7

Telegram gives a bot two ways to receive messages, and they exclude each other: `getUpdates`, which is long polling, and a webhook.

### Polling or a webhook

A polling bot calls Telegram and waits. It needs no domain, only a process that never stops. While the process sleeps, messages queue at Telegram, and its Bot API says they “will not be kept longer than 24 hours”. A worker that stays up is $7 a month at Render or Heroku, $2.19 at Fly.io for a 256 MB Machine in Ashburn, and $30.74 on Cloud Run, at us-central1 rates, for an always-on worker pool of 1 vCPU and 512 MiB. On Pethost it is one more container in the €9.99.

A webhook bot is called by Telegram over HTTPS instead: if the app sleeps, the first message after a quiet spell waits for the start.

### Cloudflare Workers' free tier: 100,000 requests a day

The Workers Free plan allows 100,000 requests a day and 10 milliseconds of CPU time per invocation. A Worker runs when something calls it and stops with the response: it is built for a webhook that replies at once. A bot written to poll, or one with a Postgres beside it, is a long-running process, which a Worker is not.

### On Pethost a bot is one more container

A bot is a service in a Compose file, and we run the file as written:

```
services:
  bot:
    build: .
    env_file: .env
    restart: unless-stopped
```

A polling bot needs no route; for a webhook, a route gives it an HTTPS address at once. If the process crashes, Docker starts it again, and security updates install themselves. With [an AI coding agent](https://pethost.dev/blog/hosting-for-ai-coding-agents/) you do not write the file either:

Claude Code

**You say:** Deploy this Telegram bot. It has to run around the clock.

- CreateTransfer bot.tgz uploaded
- CreateProject bot: building
- GetOperation succeeded
- QueryContainerLogs bot: polling started

**The agent answers:** It's running: the log says it is polling Telegram. It needs no address.

## What €9.99 a month buys, always on

Starter is the best value for about $10: [€9.99 a month](https://pethost.dev/#pricing) without VAT buys 2 vCPU, 3 GB and 30 GB, all of it awake, or €3.33 for a gigabyte of always-on memory. The same 3 GB at the platforms' own plan prices: $20.10 at Fly.io as three 1 GB Machines in Ashburn, $30 at Railway for the memory alone, $39 at Render, $42 at Heroku as six Basic dynos. A database is a further line on each of those bills. On Starter it is one more container in the nightly backup: not a managed database with replicas.

The rest is done too: an HTTPS address for every project, a deploy on every push to GitHub, encrypted backups every night, kept for 14 days, SSH into any container, and an MCP server with 13 tools. Request logs, which on Render need the $25 Pro workspace, are kept for 30 days.

## What if I just rent a VPS for a bot that runs 24/7?

You can: a server never sleeps either. Two things first. An agent on a bare server works as root over SSH: nothing tells it what runs there, and one wrong command takes down the proxy or a database. On Pethost it works through 13 tools, and its shell is inside your containers, never on the machine.

And a server is not sure to cost less. Hetzner, the one most guides name, raised its prices twice in 2026, and its cheap Cost-Optimized range has long been out of stock. Those servers are hardware it bought at good prices, before the RAM shortage, and on 5 October every plan of the range was marked “not available”. The 2 vCPU, 4 GB server it does sell, CPX22, is €19.49 a month, up from €7.99, and it arrives empty: the proxy, the certificates, the deploys, the backups and the updates are yours.

## Who Pethost is for

### Pethost is the best pick for

- **Solo developers with several small apps** that must all answer at once, on one bill of €9.99
- **People who run a bot around the clock** and do not want a server to look after
- **People who build with Claude Code, Codex or Cursor** and want the agent to deploy and read the logs
- **Early startups** that want one fixed bill, with nothing metered

### Look elsewhere if

- Your application must run in several regions or add instances by itself under load: here one machine is the limit

## Questions

### What hosting has no cold starts and no sleeping for about $10 a month?

Pethost: €9.99 a month rents a machine of your own with 2 vCPU, 3 GB and 30 GB, and nothing on it sleeps, because there is no free tier. That is room for six always-on services of 512 MB; at Render or Heroku the same money keeps one awake, at $7 each.

### Is Render's $7 Starter instance always on, and what does a background worker cost?

A paid Render instance never spins down; the $7 one has 512 MB and less than 1 CPU. A background worker costs the same and has no free instance, so a site and a bot are $14 a month, against €9.99 for the 3 GB of Pethost's Starter. Only free web services spin down, after 15 minutes without inbound traffic.

### Does Railway's Hobby plan keep an app always on, and what does the usage cost?

On Railway nothing sleeps unless you turn Serverless on. Hobby is a $5 monthly minimum that includes $5 of usage: a service that holds 512 MB uses $5 of memory, and each 0.1 vCPU it averages adds $2. Starter's 3 GB would be $30 of memory there, against €9.99 on Pethost.

### What does an always-on shared-cpu-1x Machine cost on Fly.io in 2026?

Left running all month in Ashburn, a shared-cpu-1x Machine is $2.19 with 256 MB, $3.69 with 512 MB and $6.70 with 1 GB. Three 1 GB Machines, the memory of Pethost's Starter, are $20.10 a month before volumes; Starter is €9.99 with its disk.

### Where can I host a Telegram bot that runs 24/7 without babysitting a server?

On Pethost a bot is one container in a Compose file. It runs around the clock on a machine of your own, polling or behind a webhook, and security updates install themselves. The €9.99 a month also covers its database and every other project that fits in 3 GB.

### What are the Cloudflare Workers free tier limits in 2026 for a Telegram bot webhook?

The Workers Free plan allows 100,000 requests a day, counted until midnight UTC, and 10 milliseconds of CPU time per invocation; past the daily limit Cloudflare answers with Error 1027. A Worker runs while it answers a request, so a bot there takes a webhook; one written to poll needs a process that stays up.

Read from each vendor's own pages on 5 October 2026. Prices are in each vendor's currency; ours are without VAT. The counts and the sums for 3 GB are ours.

1. [Render: pricing](https://render.com/pricing)
2. [Render: free instances](https://render.com/docs/free)
3. [Railway: plans](https://docs.railway.com/reference/pricing/plans)
4. [Railway: Serverless](https://docs.railway.com/deployments/serverless)
5. [Railway: cost control](https://docs.railway.com/pricing/cost-control.md)
6. [Fly.io: pricing](https://docs.fly.io/about/pricing)
7. [Fly.io: autostop and autostart](https://fly.io/docs/launch/autostop-autostart/)
8. [Heroku: pricing](https://www.heroku.com/pricing/)
9. [Heroku: Eco dyno hours](https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/eco-dyno-hours)
10. [Heroku: an update](https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/)
11. [DigitalOcean App Platform: pricing](https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/app-platform)
12. [Google Cloud Run: pricing](https://cloud.google.com/run/pricing)
13. [Koyeb: pricing](https://www.koyeb.com/pricing)
14. [Koyeb: instances](https://www.koyeb.com/docs/reference/instances)
15. [Koyeb: joining Mistral AI](https://www.koyeb.com/blog/koyeb-is-joining-mistral-ai-to-build-the-future-of-ai-infrastructure)
16. [Northflank: pricing](https://northflank.com/pricing)
17. [Northflank: the free tier](https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/billing/pricing-on-northflank.md)
18. [Sliplane: pricing](https://sliplane.io/pricing)
19. [Hostim.dev: pricing](https://hostim.dev/pricing/)
20. [Cloudflare Workers: pricing](https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing/)
21. [Cloudflare Workers: limits](https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits/)
22. [Telegram: Bot API](https://core.telegram.org/bots/api)
23. [Hetzner Cloud: Cost-Optimized plans](https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/cost-optimized)
24. [Hetzner: price adjustment](https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availability/price-adjustment/)
25. [Coolify Cloud: pricing](https://coolify.io/pricing)

## Put your projects online today

A machine of your own, as many projects as fit, one flat price. Nothing metered, nothing billed on top.

[Host all your projects for €9.99/mo](https://console.pethost.dev/)

## Keep reading

- 27 September 2026 [European hosting for an app with Postgres at a flat monthly price in 2026: what €10 a month buys](https://pethost.dev/blog/european-hosting-postgres-flat-price/) An app with Postgres in the EU at a flat monthly price is €9.99 on Pethost: a 3 GB machine for every project that fits. Eleven hosts, priced.
- 21 September 2026 [Hosting with unlimited projects for one flat monthly fee in 2026: a price per machine, not per app](https://pethost.dev/blog/unlimited-projects-flat-monthly-fee/) Hosting priced per machine runs as many projects as fit for one flat monthly fee. Six small apps: €9.99 on Pethost, $30 on Railway, $42 on Render.
- 17 September 2026 [PaaS with no usage-based billing in 2026: flat prices, spending caps and overage compared](https://pethost.dev/blog/paas-without-usage-based-billing/) Of six PaaS that bill by use or per service, only Railway documents a hard spending cap. Pethost has no usage-based billing: €9.99 a month for a whole machine.
- 5 October 2026 [Best hosting for side projects in 2026: a PaaS, a VPS, or a small cloud of your own](https://pethost.dev/blog/best-hosting-for-side-projects/) The best hosting for side projects in 2026 is one machine at a flat price: three apps, a bot and a Postgres are €9.99 a month on Pethost, $34.75 on Render.

[All articles](https://pethost.dev/blog/) · [About Pethost](https://pethost.dev/about/) · [Pricing](https://pethost.dev/#pricing)

Pethost · Stephan Gomer · NIP 1133096755

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