Best Hosting for Side Projects 2026: Vercel vs Netlify vs Railway vs Fly.io vs Cloudflare vs Hetzner

Disclosure: We don't currently use affiliate links in this guide, but we may add them to some of the providers mentioned in the future. If we do, we'll earn a small commission when you sign up — at no extra cost to you. It will not change which platform we recommend. We pay for all the services we review.

TL;DR — Quick Picks

• Static site or blog: Cloudflare Pages. Free, unlimited bandwidth, global edge. Nothing else is this generous.
• Next.js side project: Vercel free tier — as long as you understand the egress trap. Cloudflare Pages is the safer choice if you expect traffic.
• Full-stack app with a database: Railway for ergonomics, Fly.io if you already know Docker.
• You want to learn ops and pay cents per month: Hetzner Cloud — €4/mo for a real VPS you fully control.
• Edge functions, APIs, scheduled jobs: Cloudflare Workers. The free tier is absurdly generous.
• Skip for most side projects: Netlify, Render, Heroku — not bad, just outclassed by the above for what we're doing here.

The short version: use Cloudflare Pages + Workers until you hit a wall, then move to Railway or Fly.io for stateful stuff, and rent a Hetzner VPS the day you want full control.

How We Evaluated

Side projects have different requirements than production apps. Criteria below:

1. Free tier reality. Is it a permanent free tier, or a 30-day trial? Do you get paused after N hours?
2. Cold starts. A side project someone visits once a month needs to not take 10 seconds to wake up.
3. Deploy speed. git push to live URL — seconds or minutes?
4. Zero-config for common stacks. Next.js, Node, Python, static — do you need to write a Dockerfile just to ship?
5. Egress pricing. The single biggest gotcha in PaaS billing. One viral post can mean a $500 surprise.
6. Databases. Does the platform offer a managed DB, and what does it cost?
7. Background jobs and cron. For the side project with scheduled tasks.
8. Paid-tier predictability. What happens when you outgrow free? Flat-rate vs metered.

All pricing below is current as of 2026 and changes constantly. Always verify.

Vercel

Pricing: Hobby (free, personal use only, non-commercial). Pro $20/user/mo + metered usage above included quotas.

Strengths:

• Zero-config Next.js deploys. The framework and the host are made by the same team; it shows. git push → live preview URL in 20–40 seconds.
• Generous free compute. 100 GB-hours of serverless execution and 100k function invocations included on Hobby.
• Preview deployments per branch are the gold standard. Review PRs live, share with stakeholders, throw away.
• Good analytics and Web Vitals built in on Pro.
• Edge Functions for middleware-style logic close to users.

Weaknesses:

• Egress is the trap. Hobby includes 100 GB/month. Above that, Pro bills $0.15 per GB. A viral Hacker News post with 50k visits can generate 50–100 GB of egress in a day. People have posted screenshots of $500 Vercel bills from a single day of attention. You can set a spend cap — do it before launch day.
• Hobby tier is non-commercial. If your "side project" has any revenue (even AdSense), you technically need Pro.
• Lock-in. Vercel-specific features (Edge Config, Image Optimization pricing, @vercel/og) make migration harder the longer you stay.

Pick it if: your side project is a Next.js app you don't expect viral traffic on, and preview deployments matter. Set a spend cap on day one.

Cloudflare Pages + Workers

Pricing: Pages is free for personal use, unlimited bandwidth, 500 builds/mo. Workers free tier includes 100k requests/day, 10 ms CPU per request. Paid Workers $5/mo = 10M requests/mo + 30 ms CPU.

Strengths:

• Unlimited bandwidth on the free tier. Cloudflare has its own global network; egress isn't a cost they pass on. This alone makes Pages the right answer for any static site, blog, or portfolio.
• Workers are absurdly cheap. $5/month for 10 million requests is about 100× cheaper than comparable Lambda.
• Sub-5ms cold starts. Workers run on V8 isolates, not containers — effectively zero cold start.
• Global by default. Every Worker runs in 300+ data centers with no config.
• Cloudflare D1 (SQLite) and R2 (object storage). R2 has zero egress charges, a direct shot at S3.

Weaknesses:

• Workers have runtime constraints. No long-lived TCP connections, no file system, limited Node APIs. Your existing Express app won't "just run" — you port it to Hono, itty-router, or raw fetch handlers.
• D1 is still maturing. Great for side projects, not yet at Postgres-on-Supabase parity for complex queries.
• Build-time quirks. Pages builds occasionally have dependency surprises you don't see on Vercel or Netlify.

Pick it if: you're shipping a static site, a small API, or an edge-rendered app and you expect real traffic someday. The free tier is generous enough that "real traffic" will still cost $0.

Railway

Pricing: Trial gives $5 of credits. After that, Hobby is $5/mo minimum (includes $5 of usage, which covers most small apps). Pro is $20/mo.

Strengths:

• Best developer experience on this list. Connect a GitHub repo, it detects your stack, gives you a URL. Add Postgres, Redis, or MongoDB from a menu in seconds.
• Real containers. No runtime sandbox. If it runs in Docker, it runs on Railway — your existing Express + Postgres stack works unchanged.
• Great for apps with state. Side projects that need a real DB and background workers are trivial to stand up.
• Preview environments for PRs, with isolated DBs.
• Clear metered pricing. You see exactly what you're spending, live.

Weaknesses:

• No permanent free tier since the 2023 changes. The $5 trial credit is one-time. You're paying $5/mo minimum from month two, even for idle apps.
• Resource costs add up for apps that need 512 MB+ of RAM or run 24/7.
• Not edge-native. One region per service, though you can deploy to different regions.

Pick it if: you want to spin up a full-stack app with a database in five minutes and you're okay paying $5–15/month for it. Best value for stateful side projects.

Fly.io

Pricing: No permanent free tier since October 2024; however, $5/mo in compute credits is included with any paid plan. Small apps run for free within that. Pay-as-you-go beyond.

Strengths:

• Real Docker containers, globally deployable. Pick regions, run multiple instances, have them talk over Fly's private network.
• Excellent for stateful workloads. Fly Volumes give you persistent storage attached to a machine. LiteFS replicates SQLite across regions.
• Auto-stop / auto-start. Idle machines scale to zero, wake on request. Cold starts are 1–3 seconds — not great for user-facing pages, fine for APIs.
• fly deploy is snappy once you're set up. A small Rails or Phoenix app deploys in under a minute.
• No surprise bandwidth bills — egress is included up to generous limits, then $0.02/GB (an order of magnitude cheaper than Vercel).

Weaknesses:

• You write a Dockerfile. Fly generates one for common stacks, but you'll need to understand it when things break.
• fly launch ergonomics lag Railway — more flags, more gotchas.
• Status-page reliability has been shaky at times in 2024. Improved in 2025 but worth knowing.

Pick it if: you know Docker, you want control, and you want to run multi-region from day one. Best choice for anyone who treats side projects as a place to learn production patterns.

Hetzner Cloud

Pricing: CX22 shared vCPU VM (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB disk, 20 TB traffic) — €3.79/month. CAX11 ARM (2 vCPU, 4 GB) — €3.29/month.

Strengths:

• Unbeatable € per GB, € per core. About 3–5× cheaper than equivalent DigitalOcean or AWS for the same specs. Any serious home-lab or side-project-with-real-workloads math points here.
• Generous included traffic. 20 TB/month egress on every VM. You can serve a lot of traffic for €4.
• Datacenter locations in Germany, Finland, USA (Ashburn, Hillsboro), Singapore.
• It's a real Linux VM. Full control. Run anything. Docker, Kubernetes (hetzner-cloud-controller), Coolify, Dokku — your call.

Weaknesses:

• You manage the server. OS patches, SSH keys, firewall, backups, TLS certs (Certbot / Caddy), reverse proxy. Good learning, but time you didn't have to spend on Railway or Vercel.
• No free tier — €4 is still €4/month.
• No managed databases at Hetzner itself. Either run Postgres in Docker yourself or use an external provider.
• Status of your app is your problem. No built-in alerting or health checks. Set up Uptime Kuma or similar.

Pick it if: you want the cheapest serious Linux VPS on the market and you're comfortable in a terminal. Pair with a lightweight PaaS-on-your-server like Coolify or Dokku and you get 80% of Railway's DX at 10% of the price.

Netlify

Pricing: Starter (free, 100 GB bandwidth). Pro $19/user/mo.

Netlify pioneered the "git push, get a URL" PaaS in 2015 and was great. In 2026 the space has moved on:

• Pages is cheaper and faster on Cloudflare.
• Framework-specific deploys are better on Vercel (for Next.js) or Cloudflare (for most others).
• Netlify Functions are fine but less mature than Vercel's or Workers.

Pick it if: you already have a Netlify workflow and no reason to change. Few new projects should start here in 2026.

Render

Pricing: Free web services sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity. Starter $7/mo per service keeps it alive.

Render sold itself as "Heroku but modern" and did a good job of that. The catch:

• The free tier's 15-minute-sleep cold start is 30+ seconds. Unusable for a demo you want to share.
• To get "always on" you pay $7 per service. A typical full-stack app (frontend + backend + worker) is $21/month — more than Fly.io or Railway for similar shape.

Pick it if: you specifically want Heroku ergonomics on a modern platform and the $7-per-always-on trade-off doesn't bother you. Most devs can do better.

DigitalOcean

Pricing: Droplets from $4/mo (1 vCPU, 512 MB RAM, 10 GB disk, 500 GB transfer). App Platform (PaaS) from $5/mo per service.

• Droplets are the VPS equivalent of Hetzner — cheaper marketing, more expensive bills. $4 gets you half the RAM and a fifth of the bandwidth of a €4 Hetzner CX22.
• App Platform competes with Render / Railway. Priced similarly. No standout advantage.
• Managed Postgres / Redis is convenient but starts at $15/mo — roughly Railway territory.

Pick it if: you already have DO credits (from a referral or conference), or you need specific DO products (Spaces, their managed Postgres pricing fits you). Otherwise Hetzner wins on price, Fly or Railway win on DX.

Head-to-Head

What About Databases?

Most side projects need some persistence. Options by platform:

• Cloudflare: D1 (SQLite) or KV. D1 free tier is 5 GB storage, 5M reads/day. Good for small apps.
• Railway: Postgres, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB — one-click, scales with your plan.
• Fly.io: Fly Postgres (managed), or run your own in a Machine. LiteFS for SQLite replication.
• Supabase / Neon / PlanetScale: All have generous free tiers. Pair with Vercel/Netlify/Cloudflare for stateful apps.
• Hetzner / DO: Run Postgres in Docker yourself, or use an external managed DB.

For most side projects, Supabase's free tier (500 MB Postgres + auth + storage) is the right answer regardless of where you host the frontend.

The Egress Lesson Nobody Learns Until It Hurts

The single most common "surprise bill" post on Hacker News or Reddit: someone deployed to Vercel / Netlify / Heroku, got Slashdotted or Hackernoon'd, woke up to a $300–$3000 bill.

Three rules to avoid this:

1. Set a spend cap on every paid account. Vercel, Netlify, Railway, and Fly all let you cap spending. Most default to "bill whatever it takes." Change that.
2. If you expect real traffic, host on a platform that doesn't charge egress. Cloudflare is the obvious answer. Hetzner's 20 TB is the other.
3. Use a CDN in front of everything. Even on Cloudflare, put Cache-Control headers on static assets so the edge does the work instead of your origin.

The Real Stack for 99% of Side Projects

If you're starting a new side project tomorrow and want to ship without thinking about infra:

• Frontend on Cloudflare Pages — free, unlimited bandwidth, fast.
• Auth + DB on Supabase — free tier generous, handles the "I need a user table" problem.
• Background jobs on Cloudflare Workers with Cron Triggers, or on Fly.io if they're heavier.
• Media on Cloudflare R2 or Backblaze B2 — both cheaper than S3 with no egress fees.

Total monthly cost: $0 until you have real traffic, then maybe $5–20 as you scale. Compare to running the same thing on AWS, where you can spend $40 just on load balancers before anyone visits.

Bottom Line

For a new side project in 2026, start on Cloudflare Pages + Workers plus Supabase for data. The free tier is permanent, the bandwidth is unlimited, and if it ever takes off you're not hostage to per-GB egress.

Move to Railway or Fly.io the day you need something the Workers runtime can't do — long-lived connections, serious compute, or a stack that's too invested in containers to port. Both are priced fairly; pick Railway for ergonomics, Fly for control.

Rent a Hetzner VPS the day you want to own your stack and stop paying a PaaS margin. €4/month plus a few evenings learning Caddy and Docker Compose is one of the best investments a developer can make in their own infrastructure literacy.

Skip Vercel for anything with unpredictable traffic. Skip Netlify and Render unless you're already on them. Skip DigitalOcean unless you have credits.