Hetzner, Sliplane, Render, Github, DigitalOcean - Picking a hosting provider for your Postgres database can be challenging, especially with all the awesome options available. Analysis Paralysis is real 😵‍💫. Who wins the race for the cheapest postgres host?

1. Hetzner

Hetzner is a German Cloud Provider with Locations in Europe and North America, with a wide variety of compute options including ARM, dedicated, and shared servers. Hetzner is loved by developers, with 70% saying that they want to continue using them according to the latest Stackoverflow survey. Hetzner provides incredibly cheap but at the same time basic servers.

Hosting a simple Postgres database isn't actually that complicated! (If you dont need HA, autoscaling, and sharding etc.). Check out this great tutorial from Docker

2. Sliplane

What if you could combine the awesome price of Hetzner with the ease of a PaaS like Heroku, Render, or Vercel? Sliplane is a PaaS on top that gives you push-to-deploy, automatic SSL, a free domain, and more for your Docker apps. Connect your GitHub account and get started in less than 5 minutes for free with a 48 hour trial. Sliplane lets you host an unlimited number of Docker Apps on your server, making it incredibly cheap if you have a large number of low-traffic apps. For example, hosting a frontend, backend, cron jobs, and postgres will only cost you 7 Euros per month.

Disclaimer: I'm the co-founder 🤫

3. Don't use Postgres!

I knooow, I know. You came for cheap postgres databases, but do you actually need one? Maybe just a simple JSON file or SQLite is enough? Don't overcomplicate your tech stack! I actually have a project running for over a few years now that just dumps data into a json file in a GitHub repository. Works like a charm!

While this doesn't work for everything, and especially not for something that needs to be 100% reliable, sometimes it's worth it to think outside the box to save some bucks 🤑

4. Supabase

Supabase is another hosting provider that is loved by developers and has grown tremendously in the last few years. At this point, Supabase provides a lot more than just Postgres. They now also have auth, object storage, functions, and can probably even make pizza. And they even have a free plan! Keep in mind that free projects are paused after 1 week of inactivity.

5. Render

Last but not least, another PaaS provider that I want to mention is Render. While Render might look expensive at first, the "Zero DevOps cloud" really makes up for it by being the simplest solution in this list while also providing a free tier for Postgres. In the end, the price that your database costs is not everything, you also need to consider the time you are putting in to keep everything running! Sometimes a $20 database is cheaper than a $5 database if you need to work 10 hours less per month, just keep that in mind :)

Conclusion

I hope you learned something new, and always keep in mind to include the price of your own sanity when checking out prices!

Also, I'd love to know where you are hosting your Docker apps. What features do you love, and which do you dislike? Let's discuss it!