Planned region → Canada
Not available yet. US East (New Jersey) is a region we are planning, not one you can deploy to. Hostim runs one live region today, in Falkenstein, Germany.
Rails runs on Hostim as a Puma container with managed PostgreSQL, a separate worker app, and a volume for Active Storage. The live region is Germany. A US East region in New Jersey — about 15 ms from Toronto, 12 ms from Montreal — is in planning. Join the waitlist if that would be useful.
# docker-compose.yml
services:
web:
image: my-rails-app
environment:
- RAILS_ENV=production
- RAILS_LOG_TO_STDOUT=1
db:
image: postgres:16Canada has more Rails per capita than most places, largely because a generation of Toronto and Ottawa startups grew up in that ecosystem. A lot of those apps are still on Heroku and have been quietly absorbing price increases for years. The migration options all involve a trade: Kamal gives you control and a server to own, Fly gives you a familiar shape and a less familiar invoice, AWS gives you everything and a full-time job. Hostim aims at the boring middle — a release command that runs migrations, a worker defined separately from the web process, a managed database, and a bill that does not move when traffic does. The reason this page exists rather than a signup button is that all of it currently lives in Germany, and 95 ms is too much for a consumer Rails app in Toronto. New Jersey would fix that. Whether we build it depends on how many people put their name on the list.
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.
Rails hosting today usually means a Puma server behind a reverse proxy, with PostgreSQL and a volume for Active Storage uploads. The Heroku stack model works fine — but the price does not, especially after the Heroku EU sunset moves teams to dedicated dynos.
Run rails db:migrate as a release command on each deploy. Hostim builds your Rails Docker image, attaches managed PostgreSQL, and mounts a volume for Active Storage. Background jobs (Sidekiq, GoodJob) run as a second app in the same project.
Active Storage with local disk silently breaks when the container restarts. The fix on Hostim is a persistent volume mounted at storage/, or you can configure S3-compatible object storage.
RAILS_ENV, RAILS_MASTER_KEY, DATABASE_URL, REDIS_URL
No. US East is planned, not built. You can deploy to Germany today, which suits Canadian teams with European users and does not suit a Canadian consumer app.
Typically around 15 ms round-trip, and about 12 ms from Montreal. For comparison, Toronto to Germany is roughly 95 ms. For most Rails apps the New Jersey figure is indistinguishable from a Toronto-hosted alternative.
Not the ones that require storage inside Canada — New Jersey is not Canada. Private-sector organisations under PIPEDA can generally use a foreign processor with appropriate contract terms. Nova Scotia public bodies cannot — PIIDPA requires Canadian storage. BC public bodies lost that statutory rule in 2021 but often still apply it by policy.
A pg_dump and restore for the database, your existing Dockerfile or a generated one for the app, and the worker defined as a second app. Nothing about the data or the framework is Hostim-specific, so the migration is reversible.
We bill in EUR today and have not settled currency for a US region. If CAD or USD invoicing would decide it for you, put that in the waitlist notes — it is a concrete thing we can act on.
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.
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