EU hosting → the United Kingdom
UK Rails teams running on Heroku, Render or AWS face a familiar squeeze: USD billing, US operator, and a Schrems II conversation every renewal. Hostim runs Rails in Falkenstein under a German operator. UK GDPR + EU adequacy = no extra paperwork for UK customers.
# docker-compose.yml
services:
web:
image: my-rails-app
environment:
- RAILS_ENV=production
- RAILS_LOG_TO_STDOUT=1
db:
image: postgres:16The UK Rails community is large and historically Heroku-heavy. Post-Brexit, the legal answer for hosting is unchanged: UK GDPR mirrors EU GDPR and the EU has confirmed UK adequacy through 2031. So an EU-operated Rails host is a perfectly fine landing place for UK SaaS. Hostim runs Puma + managed PostgreSQL + Active Storage volume + a Sidekiq app, all in one project. Cost is usually lower than equivalent Heroku Performance dynos. Latency from London to Falkenstein is 22 ms — one extra round-trip vs a London host, almost never user-visible.
Latency. Typical RTT from London to our Falkenstein region is around 22 ms. After Brexit the UK kept GDPR almost unchanged as UK GDPR. EU adequacy was renewed in 2025, so a UK app hosted in Germany serves UK users without extra legal paperwork. Latency from London to Falkenstein is typically 22 ms.
Regulator. ICO (Information Commissioner's Office).
Local law. UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. Hostim is operated by HOSTIM.DEV UG, a German company, with all data in Falkenstein, Germany — there is no transfer outside the EU for application data.
Local alternatives you may have considered: Krystal, Civo, Linode (now Akamai), Mythic Beasts.
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
Questions
For Rails apps, yes. Same deploy model (Git push + release commands for migrations), managed PostgreSQL and Redis, custom domains with HTTPS, and significantly lower steady-state cost.
UK GDPR is almost identical to EU GDPR. The ICO accepts EU-hosted services for UK data because the EU has confirmed UK adequacy. No SCCs are required for UK to EU transfers.
Typical RTT from London to Falkenstein is 22 ms. For a Rails app that mostly hits its own database, this is one extra round-trip — usually invisible to users.
Yes. Add a second app in the same project running bundle exec sidekiq as the command. It shares the same image and the same DATABASE_URL/REDIS_URL.
Spin up an app in minutes. Managed database on the free tier, custom domain included.
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