What side projects actually need (and don't)
Side-project hosting is its own category because the priorities invert. At work you optimize for reliability, scale, and team workflows. For a side project you optimize for:
- Cost — ideally free, and *never* a surprise bill.
- Low maintenance — you want to write features, not babysit servers.
- Fast setup — git push and it's live, because your motivation has a half-life.
- A database that's just there — most projects need to store *something*.
- A graceful path to "real" if the project takes off.
Things you usually *don't* need: multi-region HA, autoscaling for traffic you don't have, enterprise SSO, or paying for always-on compute that sits idle 95% of the time. Scale-to-zero and cold starts, which are downsides for production, are often *features* for a side project — you don't pay for idle.
The surprise-bill problem
The single biggest side-project hosting hazard isn't downtime — it's a usage-based bill that spikes because your tiny app got a traffic spike (a Hacker News hug, a bot crawl). When choosing, prefer:
- Hard free-tier caps over uncapped usage-based billing, or
- Spending limits / alerts you can set, and
- Predictable flat tiers for when you upgrade.
A pay-per-use platform with no cap can be the right tool — just make sure you've set a budget alert.
The platforms
| Platform | Free side-project fit | DB included | Surprise-bill risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| PandaStack | Strong (apps + DB + cron) | Yes (1 free) | Low (tiered) |
| Render | Good (cold-start free web) | Limited free Postgres | Low-medium |
| Railway | Good (credit model) | Yes | Medium (usage) |
| Fly.io | Good (allowance) | Volumes | Medium (usage) |
| Cloudflare (Pages/Workers) | Great for static/edge | D1/KV | Low |
| GitHub Pages / Netlify | Great for static only | No | Very low |
Static-only projects
If your side project is a static site (portfolio, docs, a client-side app talking to an API), GitHub Pages, Netlify, and Cloudflare Pages are excellent and effectively free. No server, no bill, global CDN. Don't overthink it.
Full-stack projects
The moment you need a server and a database, the calculus changes. Render, Railway, and Fly all do this well at hobby scale, each with the trade-offs in the table. Cloudflare Workers is superb if your backend fits the edge model.
PandaStack
Disclosure: my platform — and side projects are squarely who the free tier is for. Concretely, the free tier gives you:
- 5 web services + 5 static sites (most people's entire portfolio of side projects fits here)
- 1 managed database, edge functions, and cronjobs included
- 100GB bandwidth and 300 build minutes per month
The workflow is the point: connect a repo, it auto-detects your framework, builds, deploys, goes live, and injects DATABASE_URL so your app and database are wired together with zero config. Free-tier apps use scale-to-zero on spot nodes in a gVisor sandbox — you don't pay for idle, and isolation is solid. Five separate side projects can live under one account.
# The entire side-project deploy story
git push # PandaStack builds, deploys, wires the DB, gives you a URLHonest limits: free-tier apps cold-start on the first request after idle and run on preemptible nodes — perfect for hobby traffic, not for a project that suddenly needs to be always-on (upgrade to a warm tier if it takes off). Free databases are dev/hobby sized. It's a newer platform, so the ecosystem is still growing.
A pragmatic decision guide
- 1Purely static? GitHub Pages / Netlify / Cloudflare Pages. Free, done.
- 2Edge-shaped backend? Cloudflare Workers.
- 3App + database, want it wired together with one push? PandaStack free tier.
- 4Want a specific incumbent's ecosystem? Render or Railway are great defaults.
And whatever you pick: set a budget alert if billing is usage-based, and don't store anything precious on a free DB without checking its backup policy.
References
- [Cloudflare Pages](https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/)
- [GitHub Pages](https://docs.github.com/en/pages)
- [Render free tier](https://render.com/docs/free)
- [Railway pricing](https://railway.app/pricing)
- [Netlify pricing](https://www.netlify.com/pricing/)
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If your next side project needs an app, a database, and maybe a cron job — all free and wired together with one git push — PandaStack's free tier is built for exactly that. Start at [dashboard.pandastack.io](https://dashboard.pandastack.io).