Where to host your Django (or any) backend.

An AI-generated Image from Gemini of a corridor in a server room through multiple massive server racks.

Introduction

I have scoured through hundreds if not thousands of google search results trying to find a free or atleast affordable option for a startup to host a backend on the internet so you don’t have to.

There are many hosting providers that are known to either actively support or work well with Django, including: Heroku, Digital Ocean, Railway, Python Anywhere, Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google Cloud, Hetzner, and Vultr Cloud Compute. These vendors provide different types of environments (IaaS, PaaS), and different levels of computing and network resources at different prices.

But I assume you already know most of these. Click Here to read an article that does a comparison between most of the services/platforms/providers above. My mandate today is to indulge you in my personal handpicked providers that are intriguing to me.

My handpicked choices

1. Fly.io

“Scalable Full Stack Without the Cortisol”; is how they describe their value proposition on their landing page. Over 3 million apps have launched on Fly.io, boosted by global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. To be fair i love or are impressed with them not only because of their snarky good copy but also the feel and UI/UX of their product.

The most important thing to discuss here is the pricing, so I have broken down a comprehensive summary of that; if you don’t feel like reading through it all; Here is your answer Current Hobby Plan: $5/month after free trial credit.

Fly.io Resource Pricing Summary

How It Works

• Billing: Per organization, based on provisioned resources, prorated by time.
• Organizations: Administrative entities for app development environments and billing management.

Plans

• Pay As You Go: Default plan for new organizations.
• Upgrade Options: Launch, Scale, Enterprise plans for more support and compliance options.
• Legacy Hobby Plan: No monthly fee, limited free resources.
• Current Hobby Plan: $5/month after free trial credit.

Free Allowances (Hobby, Launch, Scale Plans)

• Compute: Up to 3 shared-cpu-1x 256MB VMs.
• Storage: 3GB persistent volume.
• Data Transfer: 100 GB (North America & Europe), 30 GB (Asia Pacific, Oceania, South America, Africa & India).

Compute Pricing

• Running Machines: Charged based on CPU/RAM presets.
• Stopped Machines: Charged for root filesystem storage ($0.15/GB per month).
• Example Prices:
• shared-cpu-1x 256MB: $0.0000008/s ($1.94/mo).
• performance-1x 2GB: $0.0000120/s ($31.00/mo).

GPU Pricing

• On-demand GPUs:
• A10: $1.50/hr.
• L40S: $2.50/hr.
• A100 40G PCIe: $2.50/hr.
• A100 80G SXM: $3.50/hr.

Persistent Storage Volumes

• Cost: $0.15/GB per month.

Network Prices

• Dedicated IPv4: $2/month.
• SSL Certificates:
• Single hostname: $0.10/month.
• Wildcard: $1/month.
• Data Transfer:
• North America & Europe: $0.02/GB.
• Asia Pacific, Oceania, South America: $0.04/GB.
• Africa & India: $0.12/GB.

Fly Kubernetes

• Managed Service: $75/month per cluster plus compute and storage costs.

Extensions and LiteFS Cloud

• Third-Party Services: Billed at list prices via Fly.io.
• LiteFS Cloud: $5/month for up to 10GB, $0.50/GB beyond.

Support

• Community Support: Included for all.
• Email Support: Available with Launch, Scale, Enterprise plans.

2. Koyeb

“Deploy to production, scale globally, in minutes. Accelerate AI apps with high-performance infrastructure. Connect your GitHub account to Koyeb. Choose a repository to deploy. Leave us the infrastructure — We build, deploy, run, and scale your application with zero-configuration.” Is how they describe their value proposition on their Landing page; I would say they are the dark horse in this race. Have tried deploying an app with them an its a breeze; connecting your Github repo and everything happens just smoothly;

The most important thing that you might be interested in not only their pricing but that fact that they have a startup program that you can apply to and get compute credit worth $30k. Additionally if you don’t feel like reading through the comprehensive pricing summary ; Here is your answer about Koyeb’s Pricing: Current Hobby Plan: $0/month pay-per-use No credit card required.

Koyeb Pricing Summary

Plans

Starter Plan

• Cost: $0/mo + compute (pay-per-use by the second).
• Features:
• 1x free Web service.
• 1x free Postgres database (50h/month).
• Run web apps, APIs, and workers.
• Git push to deploy.
• SSL and 10 free custom domains.
• GPU access.
• 3 users included.
• Notes: No credit card required on Hobby plan; upgrade when ready.

Startup Plan

• Cost: $79/mo + compute.
• Features:
• Everything in Starter.
• US, EU, and Asia regions.
• 6 users included (more as an add-on).
• Up to 128GB of RAM & 40 vCPU per service.
• E-mail support and chat.
• Slack cross-connect.
• 99.9% uptime SLA.

Enterprise Plan

• Cost: Custom, starting at $1000/mo with committed usage.
• Features:
• Custom RAM, CPU, and GPU.
• Private dedicated locations.
• Unlimited users.
• SSO, RBAC, and Audit trail.
• ISO27001 and SOC2 Certifications.
• 99.99% uptime SLA.
• 24×7×365 premium support.

General Features (Included in All Plans)

• High-performance bare metal servers.
• Global edge acceleration and CDN.
• Autobuild for multiple languages (Node, Python, Go, Java, Ruby, PHP, etc.).
• Global VPC across regions.
• Free inbound bandwidth.
• Deploy Docker from any registry.
• HTTP/2, WebSocket, and gRPC support.
• 100GB of free outbound transfer.
• Deploy from Dockerfile.
• Service mesh & discovery.
• Anti-DDoS.
• Infrastructure autohealing.
• Automatic OS patching.
• Continuous deployment with Canary.
• Secrets management.
• Horizontal scaling with global load-balancing.
• CLI, API, Terraform, and Pulumi.
• Real-time logs and metrics.
• Autoscaling.
• Community support.

GPU Pricing

• RTX-4000-SFF-ADA: $375/mo ($0.00014/s) — 20 GB VRAM, 6 CPU / 44 GB RAM.
• V100-SXM2: $632/mo — 16 GB VRAM, 8 CPU / 44 GB RAM.
• L4: $744/mo — 24 GB VRAM, 15 CPU / 44 GB RAM.
• L40S: $1488/mo — 48 GB VRAM, 30 vCPUs / 92 GB RAM.
• A100: $2009/mo — 80 GB VRAM, 15 vCPUs / 180 GB RAM.
• H100: $2454/mo — 80 GB VRAM, 15 vCPUs / 180 GB RAM.

Serverless Postgres Pricing

• Free: 50h/month, 1 GB RAM, 0.25 CPU.
• Small: $21/mo, 1 GB RAM, 0.25 CPU.
• Medium: $42/mo, 2 GB RAM, 0.5 CPU.
• Large: $95/mo, 4 GB RAM, 1 CPU.
• Additional Storage: $2/mo per 10 GiB.
• Usage: $0.000008/s for Small; $0.10/GB for additional storage.

FAQs

• Credit Card: Not required to start on the Hobby plan.
• Starter Plan: Free, with one Web Service and Database, 10 custom domains; credit card required.
• Charges: Based on actual usage, billed per second.
• Differences Between Plans: Starter for non-critical apps; Startup for production; Enterprise for large, mission-critical apps.
• Outbound Bandwidth: Charged at $0.04/GB after free tier.
• Custom Domain: Yes, with free SSL for 10 domains.
• Cancellation: Anytime with prorated credit for unused time.

Render

Finally darling Render 😍😘; This has been the go-to platform for most of our MVP projects; we’ve tried it; tested it and stretched the limits of it’s free resources and are forever grateful for the team at Render. It’s no mean feat giving free compute albeit small or miniscule to users indefinitely. (Not speaking about the database).

Render describes their value proposition as “Your fastest path to production. Build, deploy, and scale your apps with unparalleled ease — from your first user to your billionth.” And yes you can get started for free.

Here is a comprehensive breakdown of their pricing if you want to go over the free fence and get into the real thick of things.

Render Pricing Summary

Plan Tiers

Individual

• Cost: $0/month + compute costs.
• Designed for: Hobbyists, students, and indie hackers.

Team

• Cost: $19/user/month + compute costs.
• Designed for: Small teams and early-stage startups.

Organization

• Cost: $29/user/month + compute costs.
• Designed for: Larger teams with complex needs.

Enterprise

• Cost: Custom pricing + compute costs.
• Designed for: Ultimate power and customization needs.

Services

• Static Sites
• Cost: $0/month.
• Features: Lightning-fast CDN, automatic continuous deploys from Git, instant cache invalidation, custom domains with fully managed TLS.
• Web Services
• Cost: From $0/month.
• Features: Web services with HTTP/2 and full TLS, support for Node, Python, Go, Rust, Ruby, Elixir, private services, custom Docker containers, SSDs at $0.25/GB per month.
• PostgreSQL
• Cost: From $0/month.
• Features: Fully managed PostgreSQL, connect from anywhere, automatic daily backups for paid instances, expandable storage, 1 GB SSD storage included, point-in-time recovery.
• Redis®
• Cost: From $0/month.
• Features: Fully managed Redis, connect from anywhere, maximize availability by queueing jobs, reduce primary DB’s load, cache pages, results, fragments.
• Cron Jobs
• Cost: From $1/month.
• Features: Run any command or script periodically, failure notifications, full support for cron expressions, prorated by the second, live cron job logs.

Features Across Plans

• Build & Deploy: Web Services, Static Sites, Cron Jobs, One-Off Jobs, Background Workers, Free Instances, Build Pipeline (500 minutes/month for Individual, 500 minutes/user/month for Team and Organization, custom for Enterprise).
• Free Bandwidth: 100 GB for Individual, 500 GB for Team, 1 TB for Organization, custom for Enterprise.
• Data Stores: Managed PostgreSQL, Automated Backups, Read Replicas, Point-in-Time Recovery, High Availability, Managed Redis, Persistence, Persistent Disks.
• Collaboration: Auto Deploys from Git, Service Previews, Deploy Hooks, Preview Environments, up to 10 team members for Individual, unlimited for Team and Organization, custom for Enterprise.
• Convenience: Native Runtimes, Docker Builds, Pre-Deploy Command, Infrastructure-as-Code, Environment Groups, Monorepo Support, Automatic Brotli Compression, Custom Domains with free TLS, Wildcard Domains.
• Uptime & Monitoring: Zero-Downtime Deploys, Health Checks, Instant Rollbacks, Log Retention (7 days for Individual, 14 days for Team, 30 days for Organization and Enterprise), Log Streams, HTTP Request Logs, Contractual Uptime SLA.
• Networking: Premium Global CDN, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, WebSocket, Static Outbound IPs, Private Networking, Service Discovery.
• Security: HTTPS only, SSH access, DDoS Protection, Secret Files, 2FA, GDPR DPA, SOC 2 Type 2 Report.
• Support: Community Forum, Email Support, Chat Support, Migration Support, Customer Success Engineer, First Response Support SLA, Urgent Support SLA, Architecture Review, Dedicated Support Engineer, Private Slack Channel, Quarterly Account Review.

Billing and FAQs

• Billing: Monthly plan costs depend on plan type and number of users, compute usage is billed and prorated by the second.
• No Activity Fee: Team member fee waived if no services and no activity during a month.
• Team Members: Billed based on user count at the end of the billing period.
• Pipeline Minutes: Track build and pre-deploy task durations, viewable from the dashboard’s Billing page.
• Free Instances: Usage limits designed for exploring tech, building personal projects, and previewing Render’s experience.
• Payment Methods: Accepts all major credit and debit cards, processed securely by Stripe.

Some of the things to consider when choosing a host:

• How busy your site is likely to be and the cost of data and computing resources required to meet that demand.
• Level of support for scaling horizontally (adding more machines) and vertically (upgrading to more powerful machines) and the costs of doing so.
• Where the supplier has data centres, and hence where access is likely to be fastest.
• The host’s historical uptime and downtime performance.
• Tools provided for managing the site — are they easy to use and are they secure (e.g. SFTP vs. FTP).
• Inbuilt frameworks for monitoring your server.
• Known limitations. Some hosts will deliberately block certain services (e.g. email). Others offer only a certain number of hours of “live time” in some price tiers, or only offer a small amount of storage.
• Additional benefits. Some providers will offer free domain names and support for TLS certificates that you would otherwise have to pay for.
• Whether the “free” tier you’re relying on expires over time, and whether the cost of migrating to a more expensive tier means you would have been better off using some other service in the first place!

Conclusion

That’s the end of this article on where to host your Django (or any) backend and also my cherry picks for providers. I hope you’ve found them useful. You can check out an open source Project Management software we are building on GitHub here. Contributions and any sort of support is welcome.

See Also

AWS Beanstalk tutorial

Deploy Django on Fly.io

Deploy django app on Google App Engine

Hosting a Django project on Heroku

Deploy a Django app on Render

Deploy a Django project on pythonanywhere

Documentation on Django deployment

Deploying django backend on platform.sh