Deployment & Hosting
Where to put the app once it builds.
Frontend / full-stack JS PaaS
- ★ Vercel — Next.js's home; best DX in the space; preview deploys; generous free tier; pricing scales steeply with traffic.
- ★ Cloudflare Pages / Workers — globally distributed; generous free tier; no egress fees on R2; best price/perf for many workloads.
- Netlify — mature, polished; similar shape to Vercel; great for Astro / Hugo / static + functions.
App PaaS (containers / Buildpacks)
- ★ Fly.io — global VMs, great Postgres, fly.toml config; very developer-friendly.
- ★ Railway — clean UI, instant Postgres/Redis/etc. Free trial; pay-as-you-go.
- Render — similar to Railway; generous static-site free tier.
- Heroku — still around; less recommended in 2026 vs above.
- Koyeb — global Workers-style runtime.
- AWS App Runner / GCP Cloud Run / Azure Container Apps — cloud-provider PaaS.
Self-host PaaS
- ★ Coolify — open-source Vercel/Heroku-on-your-VPS; very popular in 2026.
- Dokploy — newer Coolify alternative.
- Caprover, Dokku — older.
- Kamal 2 — Rails/Basecamp's deploy tool; works for any container; runs on a couple of VPSes.
Infrastructure as code
- Pulumi — TypeScript-first IaC.
- Terraform / OpenTofu — incumbent.
- SST 3 — TypeScript IaC for AWS-heavy stacks.
- Encore — see Full-stack Platforms.
Database hosts
See Databases & ORMs: Neon, Supabase, Railway, Render, Crunchy, RDS, Turso.
DNS / CDN / edge
- Cloudflare — DNS, CDN, Workers, Pages, R2, D1. The default for new projects.
- Bunny.net — cheap CDN with generous free tier.
- Fastly — Compute@Edge for edge compute.
Pick this if…
- Default Next.js app: Vercel (best DX) or Cloudflare Pages (best price).
- Need real Postgres + jobs + a static IP: Fly.io or Railway.
- Self-host your own apps: Coolify on a Hetzner box.
- Static site / docs: Cloudflare Pages or Netlify.