Synthesis

The evolving thesis. Current best understanding of this wiki’s topic, updated on every ingest.

Current thesis

This wiki tracks cloud-hosting providers. The corpus now spans three models of how projects get hosted — raw IaaS, managed PaaS, and edge compute — anchored at the top by a hyperscaler and organized along a pricing/acquisition-model spectrum:

The hyperscaler anchor. aws is the high/complex end the whole spectrum implicitly defines against: 200+ à-la-carte services you assemble and separately meter. Its revamped 2025 free tier is a credit funnel ($200 credits, 6-month auto-close, 30+ always-free services) — the same “free has a shape” mechanic as oracle-cloud-free but time-boxed rather than permanent. Most of the Tier-2 PaaS pitches (“no idle markup,” git-push) are really pitches against assembling raw AWS yourself, so AWS is the baseline that explains why managed PaaS exists.

Tier 1 — raw IaaS (you rent the box):

• hetzner-cloud — low-cost paid IaaS. Wins on price-per-resource; fixed monthly VPS, bundled traffic, no free tier. “Cheap and simple.”
• oracle-cloud-free — free-tier funnel. A permanent Always Free allowance + a $300 / 30-day trial, converting to Pay-As-You-Go. The quotas are now pinned down (Arm A1: 4 OCPU / 24 GB, 200 GB block, 2 Autonomous DBs, 10 TB/mo egress) — unusually generous — gated behind funnel mechanics: card required, one account/person, idle-30-day suspension.
• digitalocean — the IaaS↔PaaS midpoint. Droplets and App Platform in one vendor — proof the tiers are a continuum, not a wall.

Tier 2 — managed developer PaaS (you push code, they run it):

• fly-io — pure pay-as-you-go, no base fee, per-second compute, metered egress ($0.02/GB), 18+ edge regions; no free tier. Bills “resources pro-rated by time.”
• render — free-but-it-sleeps: 750 free instance-hours/mo, spins down after 15 min idle, free static sites, free Postgres that expires in 30 days; Heroku-lineage managed PaaS.
• railway — subscription + usage hybrid: $5/mo Hobby + per-second metering, “no overprovisioning, no idle markup.”
• vercel — the frontend-specialized PaaS (maker of Next.js): pure usage-metered Managed Infrastructure (1M free function invocations / 4 CPU-hrs on Hobby, then it stops) with the box abstracted away entirely — you ship a framework build, not a sized machine. (Cross-spoke seam: Vercel hosts static-site-wiki’s frameworks.)

Tier 3 — edge compute (no instance to size): cloudflare is a third model entirely — Workers/Pages/R2/Workers AI, global and per-request, with R2’s no egress fees the sharp foil to fly-io‘s metered egress. Workers AI also directly addresses the “where do AI stacks run?” question.

So the real axis is a cost-model spectrum: hyperscaler à-la-carte (aws) → fixed monthly VPS (hetzner-cloud) → permanent free tier + PAYG (oracle-cloud-free) → IaaS/PaaS midpoint (digitalocean) → edge per-request (cloudflare) → low monthly floor + per-second usage (railway) → pure pay-as-you-go (fly-io/vercel) → free-with-spin-down (render). Tier 1 sells capacity; Tier 2 sells a deploy workflow (git push, zero-downtime deploys, preview envs) and bills actual usage; the edge tier sells global per-request execution with no machine to size. A recurring catch shows up across the free tiers — Oracle’s idle-suspension, Render’s spin-down + Postgres-expiry, Fly’s metered egress vs Hetzner’s bundled traffic — “free” always has a shape.

Sourcing caveat: these remain mostly vendor/official surfaces (pricing & docs pages) — good for what’s offered. The first neutral third-party benchmark now lands too: vpsbenchmarks-docean-hetzner grades providers A–F on a percentile curve from a reproducible suite (web/sysbench/geekbench/fio/iperf3), so vendor claims can finally be checked against independent reliability/price-perf data. (An earlier Oracle signup-SPA stub was removed 2026-05-31; see log.md.)

Open questions

• How does Hetzner compare with Render/Railway/Fly on price/limits for small projects? Now mapped (above): a fixed-VPS vs. usage-metered-PaaS split. Still open: independent reliability / price-performance benchmarks (all current data is vendor-stated). Now opened (2026-06-12): vpsbenchmarks-docean-hetzner is the first neutral benchmark — it corroborates the vendor-built story (hetzner-cloud best price-per-resource; digitalocean weak on raw synthetic CPU/RAM, strong as a platform). Still want the PaaS tier (Fly/Render/Railway) measured independently — VPSBenchmarks covers raw VPS, not managed PaaS. Searched 2026-06-15 (quality cycle): no neutral source found. The PaaS-comparison space is entirely affiliate-monetized review/comparison content (ExpressTech, SaaSPricePulse, The Software Scout, DevToolReviews, etc.) — T3/T4 with referral incentives, not reproducible-methodology benchmarks. So this gap stays open by scarcity, not oversight: closing it needs a “VPSBenchmarks-for-PaaS” (a methodology-disclosed cold-start/throughput/price suite) that does not appear to exist publicly. Per the floor-raise rule, no source added rather than padding the spoke with more affiliate comparisons.
• Catches of “free tier” offerings; the actual Oracle Always Free quotas. Answered: Oracle quotas pinned (oracle-cloud-free); free-tier catches catalogued (idle-suspension, spin-down, DB-expiry, metered egress). Remaining nuance: real-world egress overage bills at scale.
• Which providers do the AI-agent/brain stacks actually run on, and why? Partially: render/railway/fly-io are the common managed targets (git-push, per-second, edge); still want a concrete stack→provider mapping.
• (new) Tier 1 vs Tier 2 crossover: at what scale does raw IaaS (hetzner-cloud) beat usage-metered PaaS on cost — i.e. where does the “no idle markup” promise stop paying off?

Contradictions

None yet. (Watch vendor-stated pricing against future independent benchmarks.)

Index

Catalog of every wiki page, grouped by schema.org @type. Read this first when answering a query, then drill into the relevant pages. Updated on every ingest.

WebPage (sources)

Tier 1 — raw IaaS

• hetzner-cloud — Hetzner Cloud hosting (German, GDPR, low-cost) product page · source
• oracle-cloud-free — Oracle Cloud Free Tier: $300/30-day trial + permanent Always Free (quotas pinned) · source

Tier 2 — managed developer PaaS

• fly-io — Fly.io: per-second pay-as-you-go, edge regions, metered egress; no free tier · source
• render — Render: managed PaaS; free-but-spins-down (750 hrs/mo), free static sites, 30-day free Postgres · source
• railway — Railway: usage-metered PaaS; $5/mo Hobby + per-second billing, “no idle markup” · source

Spans tiers / edge

• digitalocean — developer cloud; Droplets (IaaS) + App Platform (PaaS); the Hetzner↔hyperscaler midpoint · source
• cloudflare — edge compute: Workers / Pages / R2 (no-egress) / Workers AI; a third model (global edge, per-request) · source

Hyperscaler / frontend PaaS

• aws — the hyperscaler anchor; 200+ à-la-carte services; revamped 2025 credit-funnel free tier ($200 / 6-month) · source
• vercel — frontend-specialized usage-metered PaaS (maker of Next.js); Hobby free allowances, box abstracted away · source

Independent benchmarks (third-party)

• vpsbenchmarks-docean-hetzner — VPSBenchmarks: neutral A–F price/perf grading; Hetzner beats DigitalOcean on value; first non-vendor source · source

Synthesis

• synthesis — the evolving thesis (open questions + flagged contradictions)