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226 posts tagged with "Cost Optimization"

Cloud vs owned-hardware cost breakdowns and bill analysis

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Vercel Repriced Four Times in 20 Months: What Your Next.js Bill Actually Costs Now
·Dora Noda·13 min

Vercel Repriced Four Times in 20 Months: What Your Next.js Bill Actually Costs Now

Vercel changed pricing four times in 20 months, Render cut included bandwidth 100GB to 5GB, and Fly.io added two new billing lines. A timeline and line-by-line cost for the same Next.js app on each platform versus a flat Hetzner box.

self-hosting
PaaS
cost-optimization
hosting
+1
Your PaaS Bill Lied to You: The Real Cost of Railway, Render, Fly.io and Vercel in 2026
·Dora Noda·12 min

Your PaaS Bill Lied to You: The Real Cost of Railway, Render, Fly.io and Vercel in 2026

Tural Allahverdiyev's June 2026 teardown put Railway, Render, Fly.io, Vercel and Cloudflare Workers on one page after four Vercel repricings and Heroku's sustaining mode — then priced the same app on a flat Hetzner box. A line-by-line recompute with egress math and the bandwidth number that actually drives the bill.

PaaS
cost-optimization
cloud infrastructure
self-hosting
+1
Coolify Cloud's $5 for 2 Servers vs a Hetzner CX22 at €4.35: What the $5 Actually Rents
·Dora Noda·15 min

Coolify Cloud's $5 for 2 Servers vs a Hetzner CX22 at €4.35: What the $5 Actually Rents

Coolify Cloud is $5/month for 2 servers, then $3 per extra — on top of the Hetzner CX22 it runs on. A line-by-line teardown of what the $5 rents, what €4.35 bought before 2026's hikes, and where per-server rent breaks a growing fleet.

self-hosting
PaaS
cost-optimization
hosting
+1
Coolify Cloud at $5 for 2 Servers vs a Raw Hetzner CX22 at €4.35: What That Subscription Actually Buys
·Dora Noda·14 min

Coolify Cloud at $5 for 2 Servers vs a Raw Hetzner CX22 at €4.35: What That Subscription Actually Buys

Coolify Cloud charges $5 for two servers plus $3 per extra — on top of the Hetzner CX22 it manages at €4.35 with 20TB included. A line-by-line teardown of the real totals at 1, 2, 5, and 10 servers and where the fleet still stays manual.

self-hosting
PaaS
infrastructure
cost-optimization
+1
Railway's $5 Looks Flat Until the Meter Starts: Where It Beats — and Loses to — a €10 Hetzner Box
·Dora Noda·18 min

Railway's $5 Looks Flat Until the Meter Starts: Where It Beats — and Loses to — a €10 Hetzner Box

Railway's $5 Hobby and $20 Pro are credits, not caps — overage bills $10/GB RAM and $20/vCPU per month. A three-tier teardown shows the exact GB-hour where Railway stops being cheaper than a flat €10 Hetzner CX22 and why bursty workloads rewrite the math.

self-hosting
PaaS
cost-optimization
infrastructure
+1
Docker Hub Raised Prices 80 Percent, Then Cancelled Rate Limits — Why Your CI Still Needs a Mirror
·Dora Noda·16 min

Docker Hub Raised Prices 80 Percent, Then Cancelled Rate Limits — Why Your CI Still Needs a Mirror

Docker Hub raised Pro 80 percent and Team 67 percent, then cancelled planned pull charges — but 100 pulls per 6 hours still blocks burst CI. A line-by-line cost and failure-mode comparison of paying Docker, riding free-tier limits, or running Harbor as a pull-through cache on hardware you already own.

self-hosting
PaaS
infrastructure
cost-optimization
+1
Hetzner Raised Prices Three Times in 2026 — The RAM Shortage Behind Your Next Bill
·Dora Noda·13 min

Hetzner Raised Prices Three Times in 2026 — The RAM Shortage Behind Your Next Bill

Hetzner repriced cloud servers three times in 2026 — 30% in April, then 113–175% on dedicated vCPU in June — driven by a DRAM shortage as HBM for AI accelerators crowds out DDR5. Here is the timeline, the wafer math behind it, and what it does to a Cluster API fleet's real bill.

self-hosting
PaaS
cost-optimization
infrastructure
+1
The Egress Tax: Why the Same 500 GB Costs $0 or $60 Depending on the Logo on Your Invoice
·Dora Noda·16 min

The Egress Tax: Why the Same 500 GB Costs $0 or $60 Depending on the Logo on Your Invoice

A 500 GB/month image-heavy workload costs $0 on Cloudflare R2, $8 on Fly.io North America, $36 on AWS S3, and $56 on Fly Africa — same bytes, 127x spread. A line-by-line recompute across seven providers, sensitivity at 50 GB to 20 TB, and why zero egress still leaves a self-hosted S3 as the honest hedge.

self-hosting
PaaS
cost-optimization
infrastructure
+1
Every Step Now Has a Price Tag: What Cloudflare Workflows' Per-Step Billing Means for Your Orchestration Budget
·Dora Noda·12 min

Every Step Now Has a Price Tag: What Cloudflare Workflows' Per-Step Billing Means for Your Orchestration Budget

Cloudflare Workflows starts billing per step on August 10, 2026 — turning every sleep, event wait, and retry into a line item. Three worked pipelines show where the meter moves first and when owning the orchestrator on a flat Hetzner box costs less.

self-hosting
PaaS
cost-optimization
infrastructure
Showing 28–36 of 226 posts