Dora Noda
Software Engineer
2277 posts · View all authors
Hetzner Just Tripled Its Best VMs: What the 2.7x Price Shock Does to Self-Hosting Math
Hetzner raised CCX and CPX cloud servers 2.1x to 2.75x on June 15 on top of April's 37% hike. A line-by-line repricing of the same Node.js plus Postgres workload against Railway, Render, and Fly.io's 2026 meters shows the gap narrowed — but the flat box still wins once egress is counted.
Hetzner's New -Ltd Tier: What Lower-Cost Hardware Really Trades Away
Hetzner's June 15, 2026 standardization added a cheaper -1-Ltd tier built from lower-cost components alongside fixed -1/-2/-3 types. Here's what the discount actually buys, what variance it introduces, and why a Cluster API fleet should not default its node pool to it.
Kubero's PaaS on Kubernetes: What a Dashboard Over kubectl Actually Solves — and What You Still Operate Yourself
Kubero gives you a polished PaaS surface on Kubernetes — git-push deploys, pipelines, and add-ons without Helm — but it assumes you already own a healthy cluster. Here is exactly what the dashboard automates, what it leaves you holding, and where a Cluster API fleet closes the gap.
NocoDB's Enterprise Gate Is the Third Warning: How to Vet a Self-Hosted Platform's License Before It Vets You
NocoDB gated Calendar Sync and Image Annotations behind Enterprise in July 2026 — after Plex paywalled remote streaming and MinIO stripped its admin console. Three moves, one pattern, and a five-question checklist to tell Apache-2.0 from open-core before you build on it.
Plex Paywalled Your Own Movies: Three Self-Hosting Rug-Pulls and the Apache 2.0 Test That Catches the Next One
Plex paywalled remote streaming, MinIO stripped its admin console, and NocoDB gated new features behind Enterprise — three self-hosted tools that moved free features behind a paywall in 18 months, and the license checklist that separates Apache 2.0 from open-core risk.
R2 at $0, B2 at $0.01, S3 at $0.09: What Egress Really Costs Your Object Store
The same 500 GB of object storage costs $7.50 on R2, $3.48 on B2, and $11.50 on S3 — but egress flips the bill from $0 to $441 at 10x read volume. A line-by-line recompute across R2, B2, S3, and self-hosted MinIO, plus where a PaaS should draw the line.
Railway's $5 vs Fly.io's $2: What the Cheapest Always-On Service Really Costs
Railway advertises $5 with $5 credit, Fly.io a $2 shared-CPU box. Add a 10GB volume and 50GB egress and the cheapest always-on bill tells a different story — with a line-by-line recompute against a €3.79 Hetzner box.
Railway's $5 Hobby vs. a €10 Hetzner Box: What a Solo Dev Actually Pays for an API and a Worker
Railway's $5 Hobby plan covers one tiny service — add a background worker and the same always-on workload costs $40.50 in metered RAM, vCPU, and egress against €10 flat on a Hetzner box, but per-minute billing still wins when average utilization drops below 30%.
Railway vs Render vs Fly.io on July 19, 2026: Same Stack, Three Bills, and Where the Meter Moves First
Techsy re-audited Railway, Render, and Fly.io on July 19, 2026 after all three shuffled plan names — here is a line-by-line recompute of an identical Node.js+Postgres workload, where per-service multiplication and egress tilt the cheapest-to-most-expensive gap, and what the bill collapses to on a flat Hetzner CX22.