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Dora Noda

Dora Noda

Software Engineer

2298 posts · View all authors

Railway's $5 vs Fly.io's $2: What the Cheapest Always-On Service Really Costs
·Dora Noda·13 min

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.

self-hosting
PaaS
cost-optimization
infrastructure
+1
Railway's $5 Hobby vs. a €10 Hetzner Box: What a Solo Dev Actually Pays for an API and a Worker
·Dora Noda·15 min

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%.

self-hosting
PaaS
cost-optimization
infrastructure
+1
Railway vs Render vs Fly.io on July 19, 2026: Same Stack, Three Bills, and Where the Meter Moves First
·Dora Noda·17 min

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.

self-hosting
PaaS
cost-optimization
infrastructure
+1
AWS European Sovereign Cloud: Why a Separate German Region Still Can't Close the CLOUD Act Gap
·Dora Noda·13 min

AWS European Sovereign Cloud: Why a Separate German Region Still Can't Close the CLOUD Act Gap

AWS went GA in Brandenburg on January 15, 2026 with a separate German entity, 90 services, and €7.8B behind it. Why physically separate still isn't legally sovereign — scored through the EU's SEAL 0–4 framework and the CLOUD Act's corporate-jurisdiction test.

self-hosting
PaaS
infrastructure
security
+1
Backblaze B2 Overdrive Promises Unlimited Free Egress: What It Actually Costs vs MinIO and Garage on Your Own Disks
·Dora Noda·13 min

Backblaze B2 Overdrive Promises Unlimited Free Egress: What It Actually Costs vs MinIO and Garage on Your Own Disks

Backblaze B2 Overdrive offers unlimited free egress at $15/TB/month. A worked comparison at 1 TB, 10 TB, and 100 TB shows where it beats standard B2 and R2, and where MinIO or Garage on Hetzner NVMe still wins on control and flat cost.

self-hosting
cost-optimization
infrastructure
PaaS
+1
Your Build Queue Is Idle 80% of the Day: Sizing a Git-Push Pool Without Paying for Peak
·Dora Noda·13 min

Your Build Queue Is Idle 80% of the Day: Sizing a Git-Push Pool Without Paying for Peak

A git-push PaaS build queue is bursty by nature — peaks 4–6x the average. A fixed Hetzner pool sized for peak sits idle 78% of the day; sized for average, it queues 10+ minutes at morning burst. A worked comparison of three sizing strategies and the hybrid math that beats both.

self-hosting
PaaS
cost-optimization
Kubernetes
+1
Coolify Said No to VCs and Still Won: What a $5 Self-Hosted PaaS Teaches About the Repricing Treadmill
·Dora Noda·12 min

Coolify Said No to VCs and Still Won: What a $5 Self-Hosted PaaS Teaches About the Repricing Treadmill

Coolify turned down VC funding and charges a flat $5 per month while Vercel repriced four times since 2024 and Render and Netlify abandoned per-seat billing — proof that a bootstrapped, Apache-2.0 PaaS prices to survive, not to return capital.

self-hosting
PaaS
infrastructure
SaaS
+1
Coolify v4.0.0 Goes Stable: What a Two-Year Beta Promoted to Stable Actually Guarantees — and What It Doesn't
·Dora Noda·13 min

Coolify v4.0.0 Goes Stable: What a Two-Year Beta Promoted to Stable Actually Guarantees — and What It Doesn't

Coolify shipped v4.0.0 stable on April 27, 2026 after 468 beta tags, 57,000 stars, and production use by thousands — plus 11 disclosed CVEs. What the stable tag actually guarantees for upgrade and security, what single-host Docker architecture it leaves unchanged, and how to decide whether to pin it today.

PaaS
self-hosting
infrastructure
engineering
+1
Dokploy Switched to Plain Apache 2.0 on January 21, 2026 — Why a Late Cleanup Is Harder to Trust Than Starting Clean
·Dora Noda·15 min

Dokploy Switched to Plain Apache 2.0 on January 21, 2026 — Why a Late Cleanup Is Harder to Trust Than Starting Clean

Dokploy replaced its custom Apache 2.0 plus commercial appendix with clean Apache 2.0 core on January 21, 2026. A before-and-after of what changed, what still sits under DSAL, and why a retroactive fix is weaker trust than starting clean.

PaaS
self-hosting
infrastructure
engineering
+1
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