Hosting Minimalist & Modern Stack

Minimalist hosting: static frontends, edge workers, containers

Hosting Minimalist & Modern Stack

The definitive hosting and deployment stack, optimized for edge-first speed, simple container management, predictable costs, and generous free tiers.

• Static/Edge Frontend & Serverless: Cloudflare Pages & Workers

  • Chosen over Vercel / Netlify: Vercel and Netlify have strict bandwidth limits (typically 100 GB/month) on their free tiers and can charge high, unpredictable rates once exceeded. They also restrict build times and request execution. Cloudflare Pages & Workers provide a safer, more performant, and cheaper alternative:
    • Unlimited Bandwidth & Builds: Cloudflare Pages offers unlimited bandwidth and unlimited monthly build minutes on the free tier.
    • Edge Scalability: Workers run on Cloudflare’s global network with zero cold-starts, compared to traditional serverless functions that spin up on demand.
    • Fail Safe / No Bill Shocks: The free tier disables/throttles requests instead of charging credit card overages, eliminating billing surprises.
  • Free Tier Capabilities:
    • Cloudflare Pages: Unlimited bandwidth, unlimited projects, and unlimited build times.
    • Cloudflare Workers: 100,000 requests per day across your account with up to 10ms of CPU time per request.
    • No credit card required.

• Containers / Microservices (Option A - Edge Containers): Fly.io

  • Chosen over AWS / GCP: Fly.io is optimized for developers who want to run containerized full-stack applications or microservices close to users, without the overhead of Kubernetes, AWS ECS/Fargate, or Google Cloud Run. AWS and GCP have highly complex billing matrices, higher baseline costs, and massive infrastructure boilerplate.
    • Micro-VMs Close to Users: Automatically package and run Docker containers as Firecracker micro-VMs in regions worldwide.
    • Automatic Scaling & Scale-to-Zero: Extremely low startup latency allows running services close to users.
    • Low Boilerplate: Standard fly.toml configuration makes it much simpler than complex cloud consoles.
  • Free Tier / Hobby Credit:
    • Up to $5/month of free credit (automatically covers up to 3 shared-cpu-1x micro-VMs with 256MB RAM).
    • 3 GB of persistent volume storage.
    • 160 GB of outbound data transfer per month.

• Containers / Microservices (Option B - Managed PaaS): Render

  • Chosen over AWS / GCP: Render offers a fully managed platform-as-a-service (PaaS) experience, handling TLS, load balancers, and environment variables out of the box with zero boilerplate, unlike AWS or GCP which require complex IAM, VPC, and load balancer configurations.
    • Comparison with Fly.io: Render is ideal for standard web applications that don’t need complex multi-region deployments, offering simple flat-rate predictable pricing tiers and managed databases.
    • Trade-off (Cold Starts): The free tier of Render Web Services will spin down due to inactivity and suffer from a cold start (up to 50 seconds delay) on the first request after being idle.
  • Free Tier Capabilities:
    • Free web services (suspended after 15 minutes of inactivity).
    • 500 build minutes per month.
    • 100 GB of egress bandwidth per month.
    • Managed databases (PostgreSQL/Redis) with free tiers (note: PostgreSQL databases expire after 30 days on the free tier).

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