I'm new to this, but I'm trying to deploy a hobby project while keeping my costs low. I've been considering Render and Railway, but I'm concerned about their pay-as-you-go models resulting in unexpected charges for overages. Are there any popular hosting providers that have strict usage caps to avoid this type of billing? I worry about situations like DDoS attacks potentially racking up huge bills. I'm okay with spending some money on my project, but I don't want to break the bank!
5 Answers
You can find VPS options with strict limits from many providers, often for as low as $1 a month. Just focus on VPS or dedicated servers instead of cloud-based hosting—those tend to let you set hard caps on usage.
There are plenty of hosting options under $5 a month, so you shouldn't have trouble finding one that fits your budget.
Providers like Hetzner and Digital Ocean are popular for this. They might have pay-as-you-go options, but they can be configured to suit hobbyists who don't want surprise charges.
Consider looking into Uberspace for shared hosting. You get a server account with SSH access, which is pretty flexible, and it includes services like email and backups without additional costs.
This might not be what you're expecting, but I ended up buying a Raspberry Pi and setting up an Ubuntu server for my projects. It was a one-time cost of around $200, and now I can host my apps on it—which is great since most of them don’t get much traffic. I've since upgraded to an old computer as a dedicated server; now I've got a ton of storage and RAM. It's a fun project, gives you total control, and you won't have recurring fees, though it's more upfront spend.
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