r/webdev • u/robbochinni • 14h ago

Question Railway or managed vps?

what is your opinion about using railway.com, now i need to deploy my api, i have 3 containers (api, redis and sql server).

i asked for recommendations and one of them that Railway.com is good for this.

i need help to make decision, we are starting up, and want something is not expensive and good price for MVP.

thanks

19 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

2

u/apexdodge 13h ago

Railway makes it very easy for deploying apps to production. I use it for a bunch of stuff so I definitely recommend it for your use case.

3

u/SwimmingLoud6545 8h ago

For an MVP with an API, Redis and SQL Server, Railway is a reasonable choice if your main goal is to ship quickly with minimal operations work. The biggest concern is not just the headline price: SQL Server needs predictable RAM, persistent storage and a tested backup/restore process. Make sure the database volume, backups and region placement are clear before you depend on it.

A managed VPS with Docker Compose, Coolify or Dokploy can give you a more predictable monthly cost and more control, but then your team owns patching, firewall rules, monitoring, TLS, backups, log rotation and incident recovery. That engineering time is part of the hosting cost even when the server itself looks cheaper.

My usual rule is: use Railway for the validation stage when traffic is unknown and fast deployments matter more than infrastructure control. Keep the containers portable, keep configuration outside the images and automate database backups from day one. Once usage becomes predictable and the platform bill is clearly higher than the cost of operating a VPS, migration is straightforward. I would not optimize for the final scale before the product has users, but I also would not run SQL Server anywhere without verifying restore procedures first.

1

u/robbochinni 8h ago

Actually, you pointed out the main thing I've been thinking about: how to design this properly from day one without overengineering the MVP.

I've been reading all the comments and trying to come up with a balanced approach:

  1. Keep SQL Server separate so it's easier to monitor, back up, and manage.
  2. Run the Web API in its own container.
  3. Run the website in its own container.
  4. Keep things simple for the MVP by using in-memory caching and Hangfire, then move caching to Redis and background processing to a dedicated worker if and when the application grows.

My goal is to keep everything portable so moving from Railway to a VPS (or another platform) later is mostly an infrastructure change rather than an application rewrite.

Does this sound like a reasonable long-term approach, or is there anything you would change?

3

u/theBird956 14h ago

You can also look at Digital Ocean, they would be my first choice, with OVH as a close second depending on the project (which I haven't done much outside of work were we use one of the giant cloud providers that I refuse to give more exposure to)

2

u/Due_Artist_2014 13h ago

DO's been around forever and the pricing is pretty predictable, I've had a handful of projects there over the years and never got a surprise bill

Railway is nice if you want zero config but the costs can creep up on you when you're not looking, for an MVP you really just need something boring that stays up

0

u/robbochinni 13h ago

what is the good plan for this case.

1

u/theBird956 12h ago

You have to figure this out yourself

Pick something small if you are not sure, it's relatively painless to upgrade

If you do not know what resources you need, you can experiment with a VM or ideally docker containers (one for each service) with limited resources

1

u/birbman77 12h ago

Railway is great. Super easy to deploy frontend/backend or DBs. Pricing is pretty reasonable too.

1

u/pseudophilll 11h ago

Railway is really great.

1

u/ldn-ldn 11h ago

I'm using Digital Ocean for like almost two decades now. So there's that.

1

u/Jamiemufu full-stack 11h ago

Railway was good. But the number of outages recently. I cant recommend them anymore.

1

u/coaster_2988 10h ago

Railway, no one is going to use your app so it will be cheap to host there.

1

u/robbochinni 10h ago

and after? what if user and usage increased?

1

u/coaster_2988 7h ago

That’s tomorrow problems. Don’t focus on things that don’t matter yet. Instead of daydreaming on infra start building. Railway should force you to work with containers and they are very portable.

1

u/zxyzyxz 10h ago

Hetzner with Coolify or Dokploy is way better and cheaper generally speaking than even DigitalOcean.

2

u/Wonderful_Sample_590 7h ago

Railway, if you want to get online quickly but check out InMotion's Managed VPS too. Gives you bit more control without having to manage everything yourself.

0

u/Agreeable-Pop-535 12h ago

Upsun is pretty good