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.
The 2026 DRAM Supercycle Is Permanent: What 'Not Cyclical' Means for Every Self-Hosted Hardware Bet
DRAM contract prices jumped 90-95% in Q1 2026 and another 58-63% in Q2 — and IDC says this isn't a cycle, it's a permanent reallocation of silicon toward AI. A worked cost table shows what the supercycle does to every 'self-host on a Hetzner box' comparison, and why the cost advantage over metered PaaS billing survives even as both sides climb.
Hetzner's 2026 Price Shocks: What Two Repricings Did to the 'Owning Hardware Is Cheaper' Pitch
Hetzner raised prices twice in five months — 30% in April, up to 176% on CPX/CCX in June — driven by a 171% DRAM surge. Here is what changed per instance family and what a real Cluster API fleet costs before and after both hikes.
Hetzner Raised Prices Three Times in Six Months: The "Just Use a Cheap Hetzner Box" Math, Recomputed
Hetzner repriced three times in six months, pushing dedicated-vCPU and bare-metal lines up 2.3-3.7x on June 15, 2026. A line-by-line recompute of the self-hosting-vs-managed-PaaS math on the new price list — including the tier where an 11x advantage compressed to 4x, and why self-healing fleets forfeit grandfathered pricing.
Railway's Five Postmortems in Six Months: What an 8-Hour Blackout From a GCP Account Suspension Reveals About Renting Your Platform's Platform
Railway's May 2026 blackout was caused by Google suspending the account the whole platform runs on — a failure mode no SLA or multi-AZ diagram covers. A close read of five postmortems, the hidden dependency chain of renting a PaaS, and an honest tally of what self-hosting removes from the failure tree versus what it adds to your pager.
Choosing Cost-Effective Hosting and Blob Storage in 2025
Explore the most cost-effective hosting and blob storage solutions for 2025, comparing traditional and decentralized options to optimize costs, performance, and scalability for modern web apps.