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May 31, 2025

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What is the best deal for app hosting

Discover the best app hosting options with real-world cost comparisons and insights on serverless vs dedicated infrastructure, helping you avoid costly mistakes and scale smarter.

“Control your expenses better than your competition. That’s where you can always find the competitive advantage.”
~Sam Walton, Walmart founder
When deciding on where to host your app, the options seem overwhelming. Not only are their inconsistent pricing tiers between hosting providers, but their are entirely different ways of hosting an app that cause wild fluctuations in pricing.
Many founders throw up their hands and go with what an advisor or trusted friend recommends. Then when their product scales up they get hit with a massive sometimes business-ending bill and have to re-think and redeploy the app.

What's the best deal in cloud computing?

When considering what provider to go with their are a few key variables to consider. I'll break each one down and then run you through a simulated application and pricing to help you better understand what platform will work for your situation.

Serverless vs Dedicated Hosting

Before Cloud Service Providers (CSP) such as AWS, the only option was to buy the server hardware and connect it to the internet from your office. You needed a systems admin, a good internet connection, and if you scaled, you would need to buy and set up more physical servers.
When CSPs came into the scene they offered same result (your app on the public internet), except you rent the servers. This drastically cut down on costs and made it easy for anyone to build and deploy to the net.
Dedicated hosting is ideal for backend, logic-heavy applications and frameworks. For example, if you are performing data analytics or real-time processing, you will want a server running 24/7.
Advent of Serverless Functions
Not every app needs to rent a server 24/7. Instead, what if you could just run each function individually on a tiny server that spins up, executes the function and shuts down? Now you only need to pay for executing functions instead of renting server space that gets unused. This is the idea behind a serverless app architecture.
For front-end focused apps that are just database wrappers or single page applications that mostly run client side, this can radically reduce your monthly spend.
After all it doesn't make sense renting a full server just so that it can occasionally run a function.

Fine-tuning vs Dev time

Platforms that are built around serverless functions such as Netlify or Vercel offer a very competitive free tier and good pricing for small-medium sized applications while making it painfully easy to deploy.
I've personally deployed apps in under 5 mins on both Vercel and Netlify. The trade-off is you lose direct control on where/how these serverless functions are deployed. This fine-tuned control means that you miss out on cost optimizations the larger you scale.
Balancing that out, fine-tuning your deployment environment can eat up a lot of developer time/resources that could be better allocated to adding features or increasing stability.

Bonus Features

An app does not exist by itself in the ether. Almost every app needs extra services whether that is image storage, sending emails, or domain hosting to name a few. A more comprehensive solution such as AWS will have just about everything you need in one place that is easy to coordinate.
Where as if you use Netlify or Vercel, you will need to find another third party to for some of these extra services. This can increase complexity, price, and create issues when debugging.

Scalability and the Free tier trap

Switching CSPs can be a costly, time intensive process that only gets harder and riskier the larger your application grows. CSPs know this. That is why they offer very attractive free tiers to lure you in and then hit you with expensive bills.
Typically the more abstracted the platform, the less linear the pricing is. For example, on AWS if you need to get more vCPU's or more ram you can precisely increase your resource allocation. However, on Railway, your options are to go from a 5$/mo plan to a $20/mo plan.
The examples below will demonstrate this.

Lets demonstrate with data

To start we will use two pricing models.
The first is comparing a typical front-end serverless application and the second will be comparing server pricing for roughly the same amount of compute resources for more backend resource-intensive applications.

Serverless application

Our serverless application will be built using NextJS (our favorite front-end framework optimized for serverless deployment)
For example purposes, we are going to compare plans with our application that will have the following usage:
  • 500,000 pageviews/month
  • 1,000 build deployments/month
  • 150 GB monthly egress
AWS
**Azure
Digital Ocean
$25/mo
Vercel
$25/mo
Netlify
$19/mo
Railway
$60.50/mo (pro plan)

Explanation

That was a lot of numbers. To break it down, as you can see the larger CSPs such as AWS and Azure give you a more granular pricing model and more control over how you deploy your application while also being more expensive (for this use case).
As you scale your application (typically and not accounting for dev time) these tend to get cheaper over time.
In contrast the serverless-focused platforms like Netlify and Vercel become much cheaper.
Personally if we were working with a client that had an app with these specs. We would recommend Vercel. Even though it more expensive than Netlify, Vercel has built-in features that makes deploying and managing a team much easier

Dedicated Server Hosting

In contrast lets experiment with a backend-focused application. This could be a headless API, computational intensive app, or something that requires real-time processing/low latency.

Our Research Partner

Gemini helped with some of the research, and it created a nice page breaking down its findings with graphs. Of course, AI is known to get things wrong and hallucinate.

What is best for you?

Now you have a framework in which to consider what pricing options makes the most sense for your application.
This just scratches the surface of pricing.
Choosing where your app is going to live on the internet is one of the most impactful decisions a technical team can make. What you choose will affect your ability to scale, fix bugs, and reach or maintain profitability.

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