Planned region → the United States
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 on Hostim runs the way it runs on your machine: a Puma container, a managed PostgreSQL, Sidekiq or Solid Queue as a second app sharing the same image, and a volume for Active Storage. Today it runs in Germany. A US East region in New Jersey is in planning and not yet built. If you would move a Rails app there, join the waitlist.
# docker-compose.yml
services:
web:
image: my-rails-app
environment:
- RAILS_ENV=production
- RAILS_LOG_TO_STDOUT=1
db:
image: postgres:16Heroku is where most US Rails apps grew up, and the reason teams leave is almost never technical — it is the invoice. The problem with leaving is that the alternatives ask you to become an infrastructure team. Kamal is good and still means you own the servers. Fly is closer to the Heroku shape but bills in a way that surprises people at scale. Hostim keeps the parts of the Heroku model that were actually good: a release command that runs rails db:migrate, a worker process defined separately from the web process, a managed database you do not patch. It drops the part that was not: the price of a dyno. All of that is live in our German region. What a US Rails team needs before any of it is relevant is a server on their side of the ocean, and that is what we are trying to size.
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.
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
Not to US East — it does not exist yet. You can move to our German region today if your users are in Europe. For a US user base, join the waitlist; it is the input we are using to decide whether to build New Jersey.
A worker is a second app in the same project, built from the same image with a different start command. Sidekiq, GoodJob and Solid Queue all work. Redis is available as a managed service. This is unchanged by region.
Mount a persistent volume at storage/ and local disk storage works across deploys, or point Active Storage at any S3-compatible bucket. The local-disk default silently breaks on ephemeral containers, which is worth knowing on any platform.
There is no date yet, because the decision has not been made. We review the waitlist eight weeks after this page goes live. If the demand is there, we set a date then and email everyone on the list. If it is not, we say so on the region page instead of leaving the promise up.
Yes — it is a standard pg_dump and restore into a managed PostgreSQL instance. There is nothing Hostim-specific about the database format. We can help with the cutover if the database is large.
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