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Dear Developer: Stop Overpaying for Hosting

Published May 4, 2026 · 6 min read · Dakota Hopson, Galaxy Cloud Solutions

I want to have a direct conversation with you because I think the hosting industry has done a good job of making you feel like you need more than you do.

You are paying too much. I am fairly confident of this without knowing anything specific about your setup, because most developers are paying too much. Not because they are careless with money — most developers are thoughtful people — but because the default path through the hosting landscape leads to overpaying.

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How the Overpaying Happens

You start a project. You need somewhere to host it. Someone in a tutorial uses Heroku, or someone on your team has an AWS account, or you read something about DigitalOcean. You pick one. You deploy. It works. You never revisit the decision.

Meanwhile you are paying $25/month for 512MB of RAM on Heroku that could run on $5 of VPS. Or you are paying $47/month on AWS for a t3.small that you could replace with a $10 VPS tomorrow afternoon. Or you are paying Netlify overage fees for bandwidth that does not cost what they charge.

None of this is your fault. You were busy building the product. The infrastructure was good enough. Revisiting it never made the priority list.

The Math That Most Developers Do Not Do

$30 saved per month is $360 per year. If you run two or three projects, that is $720 to $1,080 per year. Over three years that is enough to buy the server hardware to run your own hosting business.

I am not saying every developer should become their own hosting company. I am saying the money adds up faster than people think and the barrier to saving it is lower than people assume.

What You Actually Need for Most Projects

A $5 VPS handles: a personal portfolio, a side project API, a Discord bot, a self-hosted tool, a small WordPress site, a game server for your friend group, a staging environment, a development server. One vCPU and 1GB of RAM covers most of those comfortably.

A $10 VPS handles: a small production web app with a database, a Node.js or Python service with real traffic, two or three of the small things listed above running simultaneously.

You probably do not need more than that. Most projects never reach the scale where they do.

The Complexity Objection

The most common reason developers give for staying on managed platforms is complexity. Setting up a VPS sounds harder than clicking deploy on Heroku.

It is harder. Once. The first time you set up Nginx and a reverse proxy and SSL takes a few hours. The tenth time it takes 20 minutes. After that it is muscle memory. And the skills you build in that process — understanding how web servers work, how SSL works, how process management works — are genuinely valuable in ways that clicking buttons in a managed dashboard is not.

The Direct Ask

Look at your hosting bills this month. Add them up. Then ask yourself honestly: do I need everything I am paying for, or did I just never get around to questioning it?

If the answer is the latter — and I think for a lot of developers it is — give a $5 VPS a try for one project. One afternoon of setup. If it is not worth it, cancel and go back. But I think you will find it is worth it and then some.