I recently started a new project, using a NodeJS backend (with the NestJS framework). Because this is a personal project, and I don’t have that VC investment money behind me, I had to look for a hosting service that would be cheap, didn’t require a ton of configuration, and ideally one that would scale with usage.
I settled on Railway, a “serverless” build and deployment service. They cover many use cases, and are both cheaper and more streamlined than a service like Google Cloud Run.
(small note: I could have used a service like DigitalOcean, but was looking for a service that could run some DevOps as well)
When I was setting up Docker for a WordPress website for testing purposes, I realized that it was actually very easy to spin up a brand new WordPress instance & database via Docker. Railway has a WordPress template, so I don’t even need to handle the devops process myself.
This blog used to be hosted with SiteDistrict, which I cannot recommend enough for WordPress hosting. Matt @ SiteDistrict is extremely knowledgable with the technical aspects of hosting, especially in monitoring and performance improvements.
However, I was spending $40/month for two personal blogs that saw only a few posts a year, so I ultimately ran a database backup with Updraft, then imported that database (along with the static assets – very important when switching hosts!) into the new site. It only took about 30 minutes to make the switch, then I swapped over DNS.
It’s still very early, but so far Railway is estimating $6/month for hosting. I’ve turned down performance limits, and I have pretty aggressive caching with CloudFlare, so I’m not anticipating the cost to fluctuate much.