Cheap Hosting Compared: Where to Deploy Your Side Project on a Budget

You don’t need a corporate cloud budget to ship a side project. Most of the options below have free tiers generous enough to run a small app until it actually has users worth paying for.

Vercel

This is my own default, mostly because Next.js is my go-to frontend framework for side projects right now and Vercel is built by the same team, for exactly that pairing. Connect a GitHub repo, and every push to main deploys automatically. Every pull request gets its own preview URL, which is a genuinely nice way to review a change before it goes live.

It has limits, though: serverless functions time out on anything long-running, and bandwidth caps can surprise you if a project suddenly gets shared somewhere. Not a problem for the first few months of a typical side project. Just don’t assume it’ll quietly absorb a traffic spike or a slow third-party API call.

Fly.io

You deploy a Dockerfile instead of a framework. Write one, run fly launch, and Fly figures out the region and the rest. That matters if your project needs a long-running process, WebSockets, or a database sitting next to your app rather than talking to it over the internet.

The free allowance shrank a while back, but the pricing is transparent and usage-based. What I actually like about Fly isn’t the price, it’s that anything that runs in a container runs on it. A background worker, a websocket server, whatever doesn’t fit “stateless request in, response out” just works, instead of needing a bolt-on service.

Railway

One-click Postgres and Redis, a dashboard that shows logs without a CLI, and a small monthly credit that covers a typical side project without you thinking about it. Deploy from a Dockerfile or let Railway detect your build.

It’s not the cheapest option at real scale, and it doesn’t have Vercel’s edge network or Fly’s regional spread. For “a web service plus a database and nothing more exotic,” though, it’s the fastest path from idea to a URL I’ve found, and the dashboard is good enough that I stop thinking about infrastructure entirely.

Cloudflare Pages + Workers

If your project is mostly static with a few dynamic bits, this is close to free hosting that also happens to be fast. Unmetered bandwidth on Pages, a generous request allowance on Workers, and Cloudflare’s edge network is enormous.

The catch is the runtime. Workers run on V8 isolates, not Node, so some npm packages assuming Node-specific APIs (certain crypto or filesystem calls) won’t work without a shim. Check a package’s Workers compatibility before you build a core dependency around it, because finding out after the fact is a bad afternoon.

Netlify

Solid, mature, and a workflow nearly identical to Vercel’s. Worth considering mainly if you’re already using it elsewhere or a team you work with has standardized on it. Its edge functions lag Cloudflare’s scale and its Next.js optimizations lag Vercel’s, but for a static site it’s a perfectly reasonable default. There’s no strong reason to pick it fresh over the other four here unless one of those specific conditions applies to you.

Custom domains and SSL

All five handle this the same way now, and it’s worth saying plainly so nobody spends an evening worrying about it: point a CNAME or A record at the platform, add the domain in its dashboard, and you get free SSL via Let’s Encrypt within minutes. This used to be a paid add-on or a manual certificate-renewal chore on older hosts. It isn’t anymore, on any of the five above, so it shouldn’t factor into the decision at all.

A decision table, since this one’s genuinely a five-way comparison

Pick whichever gets you deployed today, not the one that wins a spec sheet comparison. The cost that actually kills side projects isn’t the hosting bill, it’s the weekend spent comparing hosting bills instead of building the thing.