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Best hosting for side projects in 2026: a PaaS, a VPS, or a small cloud of your own

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

You have a handful of side projects: two or three small web apps, a bot, a Postgres, and a new idea every month. The best hosting for them in 2026 depends on what you have, and for anything with a backend it is one machine at a flat price, not a bill for each app. On Pethost that machine is €9.99 a month for 2 vCPU, 3 GB of memory and 30 GB of disk: as many projects, containers and databases as fit, with HTTPS, deploys, backups and logs already done.

Best hosting for small personal projects in 2026: decide by what you have

Three things are sold to someone with side projects: a platform that bills each service or each second of use, a bare server, and a machine looked after for you at a flat price: a small cloud of your own. What you have decides.

A server you rent and set up yourself is another purchase: it has its own part below.

What several small web apps and a database cost on Railway, Render, Fly.io and at a flat price

Take the usual set: three always-on web services of 512 MB each, a bot, a Postgres and 10 GB of outgoing traffic a month. That is about 2.5 GB of Starter's 3 GB.

Railway's figure counts memory only, on our assumption of 0.5 GB a service: each 0.1 vCPU a service uses adds $2 a month. Fly.io's are Ashburn prices, and its supported Postgres starts at $38. Render's request logs need the Pro workspace, $25 a month more. Hostim.dev prices every app on its own, €2.50 a month for 1 shared vCPU and 1 GB: these five come to €11.00, and a sixth is one more plan. Postgres on Pethost is a container in your project, in the nightly backup: not a managed database with replicas or point-in-time recovery.

What 3 GB of always-on memory cost on each platform

A platform's “from $5” is one service of 512 MB. Starter's €9.99 is 3 GB and everything on it. Here is that memory at each host's own plan prices.

A gigabyte of always-on memory is €3.33 a month on Starter. It is $10 on Railway, and $14 in Render's 512 MB instances or Heroku's Basic dynos. More numbers: Railway vs Render vs Fly.io pricing, and unlimited projects for one flat fee.

Free tier comparison for 2026: Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, Render, Railway and Fly.io

Here is what each free plan runs, and where it stops.

A site of static files, with no backend and no database, is well served by Cloudflare Pages or GitHub Pages: both are free, and a good home for it. The limit is that the site stays static. On Pethost it is one more small container at no extra price, and whatever it grows into later, a backend, a database or a bot, deploys the same way.

The line is the first process that must stay on. Netlify's background functions run for up to 15 minutes, so a bot, a worker or an API beside its Postgres is another service at another price: see always-on hosting compared.

What a PaaS billed per use is for: several regions and autoscaling

Railway, Render and Fly.io bill each service or each second, and what that buys is capacity past one machine. Fly.io's own example runs one app in Ashburn, Frankfurt and Singapore for $27.20 a month. A Railway service goes up to 1,000 vCPU and 42 replicas on Pro. Render autoscales on its paid workspaces.

That is the narrow case: one application that outgrows a machine. A handful of small projects pays the same unit prices and uses none of it. And the bill moves with use: Railway meters memory and CPU by the second, and Fly.io has no spending cap. See PaaS with no usage-based billing.

What if I just rent a VPS and install Coolify?

You can: Coolify and Dokploy are free panels for a server you rent, and that road is for people who like looking after one. Its updates, firewall and backups stay yours, also with Coolify Cloud ($5 a month) or Dokploy Cloud ($4.50 a server), which host only the panel. Two things first.

An agent on a bare server works as root over SSH. Nothing tells it what runs there, and a wrong command takes down the proxy, a database or the firewall. On Pethost an agent works through 13 tools that each do one clear thing. Its shell is inside a project's containers, never on the machine, and billing is out of its reach.

A server is not sure to cost less. Hetzner is the server guides and AI assistants name first, at prices it no longer has: it raised them on 1 April and on 15 June 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 (€7.99 before 15 June), and €23.89 with an IPv4 address and Hetzner's backups. Add the panel (Coolify “needs 2 CPU cores, 2 GB RAM, and 10 GB disk space to run”), storage for backups, and your hours. Starter is €9.99 with all of it done. The panels are in Coolify vs Dokploy vs CapRover vs Dokku.

What €9.99 a month buys: Docker container hosting for all your side projects

• 2 vCPU, 3 GB, 30 GB a machine of your own for €9.99 a month
• 13 MCP tools for your agent
• 0 projects that sleep
• 14 nights of backups, off the machine

A side project needs what a product needs. On Starter, €9.99 a month without VAT, it is done for every project: a name under yourname.pethost.app or your own domain, certificates that renew themselves, a deploy on every push to GitHub, every request kept for 30 days, encrypted backups, SSH into any container, and security updates that install themselves. A project is a Docker Compose file, run as written: anything Docker runs.

Nothing is metered, and nothing is billed on top. The same 3 GB are $30 a month on Railway before any CPU, $39 on Render and $42 on Heroku, where a database is one more line. On a rented server the work above is yours. That makes Starter the best value for side projects: the most for the money, with the work around it done. See the plans.

Your AI agent deploys the next one

With our plugin installed, Claude Code, Codex or Cursor deploys the next project to the same machine, and writes the Dockerfile if there is none.

It cannot pay for anything or change your account: see hosting for AI coding agents.

Who Pethost is for

Prices are what each vendor's own pages said on 5 October 2026, in its currency. Ours are without VAT.

1. Railway: pricing
2. Railway: plans
3. Render: pricing
4. Render: free instances
5. Render: workspace plans
6. Fly.io: pricing
7. Fly.io: Managed Postgres
8. Fly.io: cost management
9. Heroku: pricing
10. Sliplane: pricing
11. Hostim.dev: pricing
12. Vercel: pricing
13. Vercel: function limits
14. Netlify: pricing
15. Netlify: background functions
16. Cloudflare Pages: limits
17. GitHub Pages: limits
18. Cloudflare Pages: functions pricing
19. Coolify Cloud: pricing
20. Coolify: installation
21. Dokploy Cloud: pricing
22. Hetzner Cloud: prices
23. Hetzner Cloud: Cost-Optimized plans
24. Hetzner: price adjustment