---
title: "Hosting with unlimited projects for one flat monthly fee in 2026: a price per machine, not per app | Pethost"
description: "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."
---

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

# Hosting with unlimited projects for one flat monthly fee in 2026: a price per machine, not per app

By the Pethost team · 21 September 2026 · Updated 5 October 2026 · 10 min read

You want one flat monthly fee for hosting and as many projects on it as you like: a fixed price for the capacity, not a price per app. In October 2026 hosting platforms charge per service, per use or per machine, and only the third leaves the number of projects out of the bill. Pethost is priced per machine: €9.99 a month for 2 vCPU, 3 GB of memory and 30 GB of disk, with as many projects, containers and databases as fit.

**In short**

- **Priced per machine, the projects are not counted:** Pethost, Sliplane, Elestio and Zeabur. Per service (Render, Heroku, DigitalOcean App Platform, Fly.io) and per use (Railway), every project adds to the bill.
- **“Unlimited” means as many as fit.** Starter's 3 GB hold six services of 512 MB each, or a dozen small sites, bots or scripts.
- **Six small projects, 3 GB in all:** €9.99 a month on Pethost, €28.80 on Sliplane, $30 on Railway and DigitalOcean App Platform, $42 on Render and Heroku.
- **Inside Pethost's €9.99:** HTTPS, GitHub deploys, 30 days of request logs, nightly backups off the machine, SSH and an MCP server for your AI agent.

## Three ways hosting is priced in 2026: per service, per use, per machine

The unit a host bills decides what your next project costs.

**How hosting platforms charge**

| Priced | A line on the bill | Hosts | One more small project |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Per machine | A server of a fixed size | Pethost, Sliplane, Elestio, Zeabur | Nothing, while it fits |
| Per service | Each app, worker and database | Render, Heroku, DigitalOcean App Platform, Hostim.dev; Fly.io, for each Machine | One more plan: $7 a month for 512 MB on Render |
| Per use | Memory and CPU, by the second | Railway | $5 a month for each 0.5 GB it holds, and CPU on top |

Railway gives no forecast: its pricing FAQ says it cannot give exact quotes or estimates of what an app will cost to run. Caps and overage are compared in [PaaS with no usage-based billing](https://pethost.dev/blog/paas-without-usage-based-billing/).

## What 1, 3, 6 and 10 small projects cost under each model

Take a small project as one always-on service of 512 MB: a site, an API or a bot. That is the smallest paid size on Render, Heroku and DigitalOcean App Platform. Free instances are left out: Render's sleep after 15 minutes without traffic. The sums are ours, from each vendor's listed prices.

**Small projects of 512 MB each, per month: the hosts priced per machine, then the others**

| Host | 1 project | 3 | 6 | 10 | What the price buys |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Pethost | €9.99 | €9.99 | €9.99 | €17.99 | 2 vCPU, 3 GB, 30 GB. For ten, Grow: twice that |
| Sliplane | €9.00 | €17.80 | €28.80 | €45.00 | A server of 1, 2, 4, then 8 GB |
| Elestio | $19.71 | $19.71 | $19.71 | $35.04 | A VM of 4 GB at Hetzner, then 8 GB |
| Zeabur, at Tencent Cloud | $8 | $8 | $9 | $11 | 2, 4, then 8 GB in Frankfurt, and the $5 plan backups need. At Linode: $15, $15, $25, $45 |
| Hostim.dev | €2.50 | €7.50 | €15.00 | €25.00 | 1 GB for each app |
| Fly.io | $3.69 | $11.07 | $22.14 | $36.90 | 512 MB a Machine, in Ashburn |
| DigitalOcean App Platform | $5 | $15 | $30 | $50 | 512 MiB a container |
| Railway | $5 | $15 | $30 | $50 | 0.5 GB held all month by each service; CPU on top |
| Render or Heroku | $7 | $21 | $42 | $70 | 512 MB an instance or a Basic dyno |

One project is $7 on Render because $7 buys 512 MB; our €9.99 buys 3 GB, whether one project holds it or six. At six, Starter is full by this count. For ten we count Grow, a machine twice the size.

The table counts 512 MB a project because that is the size the platforms sell. A machine counts what a project really holds: ten that hold 256 MB each fit on Starter for €9.99, while Render and Heroku still bill ten instances.

Railway's figures are memory alone, on our assumption of use: each 0.1 vCPU a service uses adds $2 a month.

## What “unlimited projects” means: as many as fit in 3 GB

A host that says “unlimited” means the count is not billed. Sliplane's pricing page says “Deploy unlimited services”, and adds that a server runs as many as fit on it. Ours says “as many projects, containers and databases as fit”.

Memory is what to count: an always-on container holds it day and night. Starter's 3 GB are all your projects': the system's own share is not counted in them. They hold:

- six services of 512 MB each;
- or twelve of 256 MB each: “a dozen small sites, bots or scripts”, in our pricing's words;
- or three web apps of 512 MB, a bot and a Postgres: about 2.5 GB.

When the machine is full, nothing is billed on top: it is the limit. If the running projects leave too little memory for a build, the deploy fails with [a message](https://pethost.dev/docs/api/) that says how much. Grow is a machine twice the size, €17.99 a month, and moving up from one plan to another follows soon.

**Who uses what.** The capacity page lists each project with its memory, CPU and disk. On this demo machine a recipe app holds 411 MB and a personal website 74 MB.

![The Pethost panel's capacity page: each project with its memory, CPU and disk.](https://pethost.dev/shots/capacity.webp)

## Docker container hosting at a flat price per server, not per app

Three other managed offers charge for the server and do not count the apps.

**The server that holds 3 GB, and what is done on it**

| Host | The server | A month | Backups | Who looks after the server |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Pethost | 2 vCPU, 3 GB, 30 GB | €9.99 | Nightly, off the machine, kept 14 days | Pethost |
| Sliplane | 3 vCPU, 4 GB, 20 GB | €28.80 | Daily, of volumes, kept 7 days | Sliplane |
| Elestio | 2 vCPU, 4 GB, 40 GB at Hetzner | $19.71 | Automated, kept 7 days | Elestio |
| Zeabur | 2 vCPU, 4 GB at the cloud you pick | $4 at Tencent Cloud, $20 at Linode; $5 more for the plan | Only with the $5 plan, kept 7 days | Zeabur, if bought through it |

### Sliplane: pricing per server, unlimited containers

Sliplane is the closest to Pethost: a flat price per server, and as many containers as fit on it at no extra cost. The difference is the server: €9 a month is 1 vCPU and 1 GB there, against 2 vCPU and 3 GB for €9.99 here. Sliplane has regions in the US and Singapore and a managed PostgreSQL from €19 a month, and it reads a Compose file through a parser, where [we run it as written](https://pethost.dev/blog/managed-docker-compose-hosting/). More in [Sliplane alternatives](https://pethost.dev/blog/sliplane-alternatives/).

### Zeabur and Elestio: a server at a cloud you pick

Zeabur sells whole servers at a fixed monthly price, which is the cloud's: 2 vCPU and 4 GB in Europe are $4 a month at Tencent Cloud in Frankfurt, $20 at Linode, and $27 at AWS, DigitalOcean or Hetzner. What it gives is that choice of eight clouds, with root SSH. It takes no Compose file, and its own blog reports that on 27 August 2026 an attacker read part of its production database, customers' environment variables included.

Elestio runs your code as CI/CD pipelines that share one VM, $19.71 a month at Hetzner or $16.06 at Netcup: by its documentation, five projects on it cost what one does.

### Coolify Cloud and Dokploy Cloud: pricing per server, unlimited applications

Coolify, Dokploy and CapRover are free panels for a server you rent and look after, and none charges for the applications on it. Coolify Cloud is $5 a month for two connected servers, with unlimited deployments on each, and Dokploy Cloud $4.50 a server. Both host the panel only: see [Coolify Cloud vs Dokploy Cloud](https://pethost.dev/blog/coolify-cloud-vs-dokploy-cloud/).

## What if I just rent a VPS and install Coolify?

You can, and no panel will count your projects. 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. Coolify needs 2 GB of RAM to run, by its documentation, or costs $5 a month hosted, and the backups' storage and the hours are yours. Starter is €9.99 with those done.

## Railway, Render and Fly.io: pricing per project against a flat subscription

A price per service or per use pays for an application that outgrows one machine: Render has autoscaling on its paid workspaces and a managed Postgres with read replicas, a Railway service scales to 1,000 vCPU on Pro, and Fly.io runs one app in several regions. A database is one more line: $6 a month on Render, $5 on Heroku, $7 on DigitalOcean App Platform. See [Railway vs Render vs Fly.io pricing](https://pethost.dev/blog/railway-vs-render-vs-fly-io-pricing/).

So count a database in: three always-on web services of 512 MB each, a bot, a Postgres and 10 GB of traffic a month, about 2.5 GB of Starter's 3 GB.

**Three small apps, a bot and a Postgres, per month. Pethost first, then by price. Bars compare at €1 = $1.1204, the ECB's reference rate of 5 October 2026**

| Host | Price a month |
| --- | --- |
| Pethost Starter | €9.99 |
| Zeabur at Tencent Cloud, with its $5 plan | $9.00 |
| Hostim.dev | €11.00 |
| Fly.io, your own Postgres | $17.30 |
| Elestio | $19.71 |
| Railway | $23.15 |
| Zeabur at Linode, with its $5 plan | $25.00 |
| DigitalOcean App Platform | $27.00 |
| Sliplane | €28.80 |
| Heroku | $33.00 |
| Render | $34.75 |
| Fly.io, Managed Postgres | $53.24 |

Railway's figure is memory alone and Fly.io's are Ashburn prices, as above. DigitalOcean's $7 database has no backups by default, and Render's request logs need the Pro workspace, $25 a month more. Postgres on Pethost is a container in your project, private to it and in the nightly backup: not a managed database with replicas or point-in-time recovery.

## What €9.99 a month buys: fixed resources, and the work already done

- **€3.33** for a gigabyte of always-on memory
- **€0** for the next project, while it fits
- **14 nights** of backups, off the machine
- **13** MCP tools for your agent

Starter is a virtual machine of your own, €9.99 a month without VAT, with nothing metered, and the work around it is done: an HTTPS address for every project, a deploy on every push to GitHub with an earlier commit one step back, request logs kept for 30 days, encrypted backups every night off the machine, SSH into any container, and security updates that install themselves. A database is one more service in a project, at no extra price.

Six projects of 512 MB, the same 3 GB, are $30 a month on Railway before any CPU, $30 on DigitalOcean App Platform and $42 on Render or Heroku. That is the best value here: the most memory for the money, with the work done. There is no free tier: €9.99 rents a real machine, so nothing sleeps. [See the plans](https://pethost.dev/#pricing).

## Who Pethost is for

### Pethost is the best pick for

- **Solo developers with several side projects**: one bill that the next project does not raise
- **People who build with Claude Code, Codex or Cursor**: [the agent deploys](https://pethost.dev/blog/hosting-for-ai-coding-agents/) each new project, and the count is not billed
- **Early startups** that want one fixed monthly bill for the app, its workers and its database
- **Developers tired of looking after a server**: the machine comes with updates, backups and logs done

### Look elsewhere if

- Your application needs several regions, autoscaling or more than one machine: here the machine is the limit

## Questions

### Which hosting platforms let me run as many projects as I want for one flat monthly fee?

The ones priced per machine: Pethost, Sliplane, Elestio and Zeabur charge for the server and not for the apps on it. Pethost's machine is 2 vCPU, 3 GB and 30 GB for €9.99 a month, with nothing metered.

### Is there a hosting where I can deploy Docker containers and pay a fixed monthly price for the capacity, not per app?

Yes. On Pethost €9.99 a month rents a virtual machine of your own, 2 vCPU, 3 GB and 30 GB, and every Docker Compose project that fits on it is included. Nothing is billed on top.

### How does Sliplane's pricing per server work in 2026?

Sliplane charges per server and runs as many containers on each as fit: €9 a month for 1 vCPU and 1 GB, €28.80 for 3 vCPU and 4 GB. Pethost's Starter is 2 vCPU and 3 GB for €9.99.

### Does Coolify Cloud's price per server include the server?

No. Coolify Cloud is $5 a month for the hosted panel with two connected servers, and unlimited deployments on each. The servers are rented elsewhere and stay yours to update, secure and back up.

### Do Railway, Render and Fly.io charge per project or a flat subscription?

None sells a flat subscription for unlimited apps. Render prices each service, $7 a month for 512 MB; Railway meters memory, $10 a gigabyte a month, and CPU; Fly.io bills each Machine, $3.69 a month for 512 MB in Ashburn. Ten services of 512 MB are $70, $50 and $36.90 there, and €17.99 on Pethost's Grow machine.

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

1. [Render: pricing](https://render.com/pricing)
2. [Render: free instances](https://render.com/docs/free)
3. [Heroku: pricing](https://www.heroku.com/pricing/)
4. [DigitalOcean App Platform: pricing](https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/app-platform)
5. [Railway: plans](https://docs.railway.com/reference/pricing/plans)
6. [Railway: pricing questions](https://docs.railway.com/reference/pricing/faqs)
7. [Fly.io: pricing](https://docs.fly.io/about/pricing)
8. [Sliplane: pricing](https://sliplane.io/pricing)
9. [Sliplane: volumes](https://docs.sliplane.io/servers/volumes/)
10. [Zeabur: servers](https://zeabur.com/product/vps)
11. [Zeabur: plans](https://zeabur.com/pricing)
12. [Zeabur: backups](https://zeabur.com/docs/en-US/operations/data/backup-restore)
13. [Zeabur: Dockerfile](https://zeabur.com/docs/en-US/deploy/methods/dockerfile)
14. [Zeabur: security incident](https://zeabur.com/blogs/august-2026-security-incident)
15. [Elestio: pricing](https://elest.io/pricing)
16. [Elestio: CI/CD pipelines](https://docs.elest.io/books/cicd-pipelines/page/overview)
17. [Hostim.dev: pricing](https://hostim.dev/pricing/)
18. [Coolify Cloud: pricing](https://coolify.io/pricing)
19. [Coolify: installation](https://coolify.io/docs/get-started/installation)
20. [Dokploy Cloud: pricing](https://dokploy.com/pricing)
21. [Hetzner Cloud: Cost-Optimized plans](https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/cost-optimized)
22. [Hetzner: price adjustment](https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availability/price-adjustment/)

## 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

- 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.
- 3 October 2026 [Railway vs Render vs Fly.io pricing in 2026: hobby plans, free tiers and Postgres](https://pethost.dev/blog/railway-vs-render-vs-fly-io-pricing/) Three small apps, a worker and a Postgres cost $23.15 on Railway, $34.75 on Render and $17.30 to $53.24 on Fly.io in 2026, and a flat €9.99 on Pethost.
- 29 September 2026 [Coolify Cloud vs Dokploy Cloud in 2026: pricing, what they manage, and fully managed alternatives](https://pethost.dev/blog/coolify-cloud-vs-dokploy-cloud/) Coolify Cloud ($5 a month) and Dokploy Cloud ($4.50 a server) host only the panel: the server stays yours. Pethost looks after the machine too: €9.99 a month.

[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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