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 US region for Node.js
Render and Railway both solved the right problem — deploying a Node service should not require a Kubernetes cluster — and both bill in a way that makes the invoice hard to predict before it arrives. Usage-based pricing is fine when usage is small and unpleasant when a background job loops or a crawler finds your API. Hostim charges for what you reserve: a container of a chosen size, a database of a chosen size, flat per month. If your traffic doubles, the bill does not. The trade-off is honest and worth stating plainly — you size the box yourself, and if you undersize it you get a slow app rather than a surprise charge. This model is running in Germany today. New Jersey would be the same platform, on the correct side of the Atlantic for a US service, and the waitlist is what decides whether we build it.
Expected latency, US 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 |
|---|---|
| New York | ~2 ms |
| Washington DC | ~6 ms |
| Boston | ~8 ms |
| Chicago | ~20 ms |
| Atlanta | ~20 ms |
| Dallas | ~35 ms |
| Denver | ~45 ms |
| Seattle | ~65 ms |
| San Francisco | ~70 ms |
Privacy law. CCPA and CPRA in California, plus state acts in Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah and a growing list of others. There is no single federal privacy law, so the obligations follow your users, not your servers.
Who enforces it. the California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) and state attorneys general — there is no federal data protection authority.
Data residency — read this before you plan a migration. A US East region means your app, your database and your volumes run on hardware in New Jersey. It does not make Hostim a US company: HOSTIM.DEV UG is German, and that is a real consideration if you have a customer contract that restricts foreign processors. Ask us before you assume either way.
Market context. US teams rarely pick a host for data residency. They pick it for price, for not being on-call for a Kubernetes cluster, and for latency to users on the East Coast. The pitch that works in Frankfurt does not work in Brooklyn — what works is a flat bill and a container that stays running.
What you are probably comparing us against: Heroku, Render, Railway, Fly.io, DigitalOcean App Platform, AWS App Runner.
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 deploy a Node app to the US region right now?
No. US East is planned and not built. Deploying today means the German region, which is a good fit if your users are in Europe and a poor one if they are in California.
What would this cost compared to Railway?
We are not publishing a US number before the region exists — regional pricing is set per region. The difference is structural rather than a single number: Hostim prices a reserved container per month, so the bill is the same whether you serve a thousand requests or a million within that container's capacity.
Does a Node process get shut down when idle?
No. Containers are long-lived and do not sleep or scale to zero. Timers, websockets, in-memory caches and background intervals all keep working between requests.
What about graceful shutdown on deploy?
SIGTERM is forwarded to your process, so a server.close() handler drains in-flight requests before the old container exits. A Node app that ignores SIGTERM will drop requests on any platform, including this one.
How will you decide whether to build US East?
Waitlist signups are the main input, weighted toward people who already pay us and toward teams who say what they would move. We set a threshold before this page went live and review it after eight weeks. Above it we build a single small node first; below it we do not build and we update the region page to say so.
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)