Deploy model
Push your Dockerfile or a Git repo with a Dockerfile. Hostim builds the image, attaches managed PostgreSQL or Redis, and routes HTTPS traffic to it. Process exit signals are forwarded so your shutdown handlers fire.
Why a Canadian region for Node.js
The complaint we hear most from Canadian teams is not about features, it is about not being able to predict the bill. Usage-priced platforms are pleasant at small scale and stressful once something loops, retries, or gets crawled. Reserving a container of a fixed size and paying a fixed amount for it moves the failure mode from a surprise invoice to a slow response, which is a trade most small teams would take knowingly. Hostim does that today in Germany, which is roughly 95 ms from Toronto — fine for a background worker or an internal API, wrong for anything a customer waits on. A New Jersey region would close that gap for the eastern half of the country and get Vancouver to about 70 ms. There is no Canadian region planned, and if that is your requirement rather than a preference, the waitlist form is the place to say it.
Expected latency, Canadian privacy law, and what we will not claim
Expected latency. The expected site is Secaucus, New Jersey; the exact facility is not fixed and any northern New Jersey site gives similar figures. The figures below are typical round-trip times for that metro — they are estimates for the location, not measurements from Hostim hardware, because there is none there yet.
| City | Expected RTT to US East |
|---|---|
| Montreal | ~12 ms |
| Toronto | ~15 ms |
| Ottawa | ~16 ms |
| Halifax | ~25 ms |
| Winnipeg | ~40 ms |
| Calgary | ~55 ms |
| Vancouver | ~70 ms |
Privacy law. PIPEDA at the federal level, Quebec Law 25 (the strictest of the set, with transfer assessments and breach reporting), and Nova Scotia's PIIDPA, which still requires public-sector data to be stored and accessed only in Canada. British Columbia dropped its blanket residency rule in November 2021, so BC public bodies now decide foreign storage by their own policy rather than by statute.
Who enforces it. the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC), and the Commission d'accès à l'information for Quebec.
Data residency — read this before you plan a migration. US East is in New Jersey, not Canada. If your contract or your provincial rules require Canadian storage, this region will not meet that requirement — tell us on the waitlist form and we will count it as demand for a separate Canadian region rather than pretending US East solves it.
Market context. Toronto and Montreal are 12–15 ms from New Jersey, so a US East region serves most Canadian users well. The exception is public-sector and health work: Nova Scotia requires storage inside Canada by statute, parts of the Quebec public sector do too, and many BC public bodies still require it by internal policy even though the statutory rule was removed in 2021. A New Jersey region does not satisfy any of those. Private-sector SaaS under PIPEDA generally can use a US region with the right contract terms.
What you are probably comparing us against: Heroku, Render, Railway, DigitalOcean, OVHcloud Canada, Vultr Toronto.
How Hostim runs Node.js
Node.js hosting today is just running node server.js inside a Docker container behind HTTPS. The interesting parts are the database, the env vars, and graceful shutdown — not the runtime itself.
Common pitfalls
A Node app that ignores SIGTERM will lose in-flight requests on every deploy. Use a small process supervisor or hook server.close() into the SIGTERM handler.
Typical env vars
NODE_ENV, PORT, DATABASE_URL, REDIS_URL
FAQ
Can I use the US region today?
No. It is planned and not built. The German region is live and works well if your users or your upstream services are in Europe.
Why not just use a Canadian provider?
You reasonably might. OVHcloud and Vultr both have Canadian locations, and both sell you a server rather than a managed platform. The comparison worth making is whether you want to own the Docker host, the certificates and the database backups yourself.
Would the container sleep when idle?
No. Containers are long-lived and do not scale to zero, so websockets, in-memory state, cron-style intervals and connection pools all survive between requests.
Is PIPEDA a problem with US-located servers?
Generally not for private-sector use, provided your processor agreement keeps protections comparable and you disclose the transfer. Quebec Law 25 adds an assessment step. Nova Scotia public-sector work under PIIDPA is a hard no; BC dropped its statutory rule in 2021, so there it depends on the public body's own policy.
What decides whether you build it?
The waitlist, weighted toward existing paying customers and toward people who describe what they would move. We fixed a threshold before publishing this page and review it after eight weeks. Below the threshold there is no region, and we will say that here rather than keep the page up as a promise.
Would you use US East (New Jersey)?
We are deciding how much capacity to build. Add your name and what you would run — that is the whole input. You can also deploy to our live German region today if that works for you.
The numbers behind this
Platform figures from the published price list, docs and our own benchmark.
€2.50/month
Hostim entry app plan
Plan sa-1-1: 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM. Flat price, billed hourly, no usage meter.
€0
Managed database free tier
PostgreSQL 256 MB, MySQL 256 MB, Redis 128 MB, volume 1 GB. No cap on how many free instances you create.
Included on every plan
Database high availability
PostgreSQL and MySQL run as a primary plus hot standby with automatic failover, shared plans included.
2,708 TPS
Managed PostgreSQL write throughput
pgbench, 4 clients, 300 s, plan drp-50 (2 vCPU / 4 GB). AWS RDS db.t4g.medium scored 1,080 TPS on the same test.
€0/GB
Traffic charges
No ingress fees and no per-GB egress line on app plans.
1 today (Falkenstein, Germany)
Regions
Bare metal, EU only, with more regions planned. No AWS, GCP or Azure underneath.
“Managed PostgreSQL runs as a replicated cluster with automatic failover on every plan, shared and dedicated alike.”
— Hostim.dev docs, managed PostgreSQL
Sources
- Hostim.dev price list — Hostim.dev (checked 2026-08-06)
- Pricing model — plan-based billing, no metering — Hostim.dev docs (checked 2026-08-06)
- Managed PostgreSQL — high availability and failover — Hostim.dev docs (checked 2026-08-06)
- PostgreSQL benchmark: AWS RDS vs Hostim vs self-hosted on Hetzner — Hostim.dev blog, July 2026 (checked 2026-08-06)