PaaS
31 articles in this category.
Preview Environments for Every Pull Request
A preview environment is a temporary deployment created for a single pull request and destroyed when it closes. What they replace, the four ways teams configure them, and the one problem no platform solves.
What Is a Staging Environment? And Why Most of Them Lie to You
A staging environment is a production replica where changes are tested before release. The definition is easy; keeping it honest is not. The four ways staging drifts from production, and what replaced it for most teams.
Coolify vs Dokploy vs Managed: What Self-Hosting a PaaS Actually Costs
Coolify and Dokploy are free, but the server underneath them is not, and it got more expensive twice in 2026. A cost comparison with real prices from Hetzner and DigitalOcean, including where self-hosting genuinely wins.
Replit Alternatives in 2026: Split the IDE From the Hosting
Replit bundles a browser IDE, an AI agent and hosting into one subscription and one credit balance. Most people looking for an alternative only want to replace one of them - here is the honest split, with what Replit costs once your app has to stay online.
7 Best Railway Alternatives in 2026: What Happens When Always-On Meets Usage Billing
Railway bills per vCPU-second and GB-second, which is excellent for bursty work and expensive for anything that must stay warm. Seven alternatives compared by what your bill does when your app never sleeps.
A Cloud for Small Software: What It Actually Takes to Build One
YC's Fall 2026 RFS asks for 'a cloud for small software' - purpose-built tools with one or a handful of users, easy to build with agents, still hard to deploy and share. Three years into building exactly this, here is what the category requires and an honest scorecard of which parts are solved.
What Is Flat Rate Cloud Hosting? Fixed-Price Compute, Explained
Flat rate cloud hosting means one fixed monthly price for known compute - no per-app fees, no per-seat pricing, no usage meters. How the model compares to metered, per-service, and per-seat pricing, when it wins, and when it honestly does not.
7 Best Vercel Alternatives in 2026: Your Next.js App, Your Backend, and Your Bill
An honest comparison of 7 Vercel alternatives - Miget, Netlify, Cloudflare, Render, Railway, Coolify, and GitHub Pages - judged by what happens to your Next.js app, your backend, and your bill.
7 Best Heroku Alternatives in 2026: What Replaces Dynos, Addons, and git push
An honest comparison of 7 Heroku alternatives - Miget, Render, Railway, Fly.io, DigitalOcean, Northflank, and Vercel - judged by how well they replace dynos, addons, and the git push workflow.