PaaS vs VPS: Why in 2026 I Use Render, Railway, and Hostinger at the Same Time

The modern developer’s dilemma In the first two months of 2026, I put 3 very different projects into production, but with one thing in common: they were all monoliths. At the moment, I’ve decided to manage the deployment of the three projects using three different approaches. 1) Laravel + Render + Neon: The "Free Tier" Paradise Laravel is a fantastic framework, but it can be heavy for free plans. I had built a time tracking app in the last months of 2025 to study inertia.js, but in a very short time it became an indispensable tool for me, and I decided to put it into production on a public server. For my private apps I often use free or almost free services (e.g. Netlify with blobs or serverless db), but we know that a Laravel app is as solid as it is complex and heavy. And then Render appeared on my path: an excellent service, available on a free plan. Right away I ran into the two real limitations: the first is the cold start, which could be ‘solved’ by setting up a simple external c