283 posts tagged with "Migration"
Migrating off hosted platforms like Render, Heroku, Railway, and Fly.io
From $1,432 to $233: What the DigitalOcean-to-Hetzner Wave Says About Mid-Tier Cloud Pricing
A production stack moved from DigitalOcean to Hetzner for $1,432 to $233 a month with zero downtime. The headline table, the unit-price recompute with Hetzner's own 2026 hikes included, and which workloads move cleanly versus force an architecture decision.
The Free Tier Is Dead (Except Twice): A September 2026 Audit of Where a Side Project Still Lives for $0
Only Render and PythonAnywhere still offer free-forever hosting in September 2026 — Railway and Fly.io are trial-credit-only and Heroku has been paid-only since 2022. A verdict table for all six providers plus worked per-project math showing why one €3.99 Hetzner box split across side projects beats every meter.
Render Taught an AI Agent to Migrate Your Heroku App: What It Gets Right, What Still Needs You, and the Bill at the End
Render's open-source migration skill lets an AI agent move a Heroku app — dynos, config, Postgres — over MCP in minutes. A line-by-line test of the before/after bill, what the agent nails, where a human is still required, and the five capabilities your own fleet needs before migration becomes a prompt.
Render Traded $19 Seats for a $0.15/GB Meter: A 20-Person Team's Bill at 1TB, 2TB, and 5TB
Render's August 1 rollout swapped $19 per-seat pricing for a $25 flat Pro plan with unlimited members — and cut included bandwidth from 500GB to 25GB at $0.15/GB over. A worked before/after bill for a 20-person team at 1TB, 2TB, and 5TB, the small-team cases that pay more, and what the same traffic costs on owned hardware.
The Heroku Exit Playbook: Procfile to Buildpack, Every Add-on Decision, and the Real Before/After Bill
A step-by-step playbook for actually leaving Heroku's sustaining-engineering mode: Procfile to manifest, add-ons sorted into keep/replace/lose, secrets without a leak window, a rehearsed database cutover, and a real before/after bill.
DigitalOcean App Platform Legacy Plans in 2026: Stay, Migrate, or Self-Host?
DigitalOcean still supports App Platform apps created before May 7, 2024, but says legacy plans will be deprecated soon. Here is the bill math for staying, moving to current pricing, or running the same small fleet on owned Hetzner capacity.
Back4App Ranked 10 Heroku Alternatives in February 2026 — Here's What the List Actually Costs Against a €4.49 Hetzner Box
Back4App's February 2026 ranking of 10 Heroku alternatives re-audited line by line — free-tier math, egress multipliers, and where a flat-rate €4.49 Hetzner CX22 with 20 TB included still beats every metered bill.
100 Platforms, One Catch: What Free Hosting Actually Gives You in 2026
A 150-platform free-tier census went viral in 2026. Here's what Vercel, Netlify, Heroku, AWS and a raw VPS actually give you for free — what breaks at month 13 — and what the same hobby stack costs on a €4.49 Hetzner box that never had a free tier to expire.
Fly.io's $2.02 Machine Isn't Your Bill: The Five Metered Lines That Double It
Fly.io's $2.02 Machine is the headline, not the invoice. A line-by-line reconstruction of what volumes, egress, egress IPs, snapshots, and private networking add to a real app — and what the same stack costs flat on Hetzner.