I launched HostingPicker
By Flavio Copes
I launched HostingPicker, a free hosting advisor with hand-checked prices, honest tradeoffs, and recommendations based on your project.
Today I launched HostingPicker.
It helps you choose where to host a web project.
You answer four questions:
- what you are building
- whether you need a database
- how much traffic you expect
- how much you want to spend
HostingPicker gives you three options that fit, with a realistic monthly price, the reason each one works, and its main tradeoff.
No email. No signup. It takes less than a minute.
Why I built it
Choosing a host should be easier than it is.
Every provider has a pricing page, but those pages only explain their own product.
They do not tell you whether another host would be easier for your stack. They rarely explain what happens to the bill when your project grows. And the important limits are often scattered across several pages.
I wanted one place that gave me a short, direct answer.
Not a list of 50 hosts.
Not a form that sends my details to hosting companies.
Three good options, with the price and the catch beside each one.
What HostingPicker covers
The site currently compares 12 providers:
- Vercel
- Netlify
- Cloudflare
- Railway
- Render
- Heroku
- DigitalOcean
- Fly.io
- Deno Deploy
- Hetzner
- Vultr
- Linode
Each provider has its own page with prices, supported workloads, features, ratings, advantages, and tradeoffs.
You can also compare any two providers side by side.
The comparison pages show realistic costs at different project stages and 15 features. Where I found useful first-person discussions, they also include what developers say about the two providers.
There are also ready-made guides for common decisions, including where to host a Next.js app, a static site, an API with a database, a Docker container, or a WordPress site.
How recommendations are ranked
HostingPicker first removes options that do not fit your stack or database needs.
It then checks your budget and ranks the remaining options by ease of deployment, followed by price.
The order is deterministic. It is not influenced by commissions or sponsored placement.
I hand-checked the public prices, free-tier rules, and important limits. Every provider page shows when its data was last verified.
If a price is unclear, the site says so.
It works without JavaScript
HostingPicker is a fully static Astro site.
The quiz is a sequence of links. Every combination of answers has a pre-built results page, so the entire flow works without client-side JavaScript.
The recommendations, provider pages, comparison pages, and guides all come from the same data files.
When I update a provider, every page that mentions it updates too.
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