Proud Member Of
Managed Docker container hosting on AWS: push a GitHub repo with a Dockerfile, point at a public image, or upload a docker save tarball. SnapDeploy builds it, runs it in its own isolated container with HTTPS, logs and metrics, and keeps it alive.
Free tier: 4 containers, 100 hours a month, 10 deploys a day. No credit card. Always-On from $12 a month when it has to run 24/7.
Last verified 27 September 2026 against the live pricing page, the platform docs and the deployment code.
Docker hosting is somewhere to run a container image that is not your laptop. You hand over the image, or the Dockerfile that builds it, and the host supplies the machine, the network, a public URL and the restarts. What varies between one Docker hosting service and another is how much of the rest you still have to do yourself.
Searches for cloud Docker hosting land on three kinds of product. A VPS gives you a Linux box where you install Docker, a reverse proxy, certificates and monitoring. A Kubernetes or ECS cluster gives you orchestration, plus a cluster to operate. Managed container hosting gives you the result without either: an image goes in, an HTTPS URL comes out. SnapDeploy is the third kind.
| Managed container hosting (SnapDeploy) | Docker on a VPS | Kubernetes or ECS you run | |
|---|---|---|---|
| You manage | The image and its environment variables | OS patches, Docker, proxy, TLS, monitoring, backups | Cluster, nodes, manifests, ingress, upgrades |
| First deploy | 1 to 6 minutes from repo to HTTPS URL | Hours: provision, harden, install, configure | A cluster comes before the first app; minutes per app after that |
| HTTPS and restarts | Included: certificate, health check, restart on exit | Your Caddy, nginx or Traefik and your systemd units | Ingress controller, cert-manager, liveness probes |
| Cost while idle | Free tier costs nothing; Always-On is a flat fee per container | Full price for the box | Full price for the nodes |
| Best for | One to a handful of containers that should just run | People who want root and enjoy operations | Teams with many services and a platform engineer |
Most Docker hosting services support one of these. SnapDeploy supports all three, and the same free tier and pricing apply to each.
Connect the repository once, public or private. If it contains a Dockerfile it is used exactly as written; if not, one is generated from the detected stack. The image is built on AWS CodeBuild (ARM64), pushed to a private registry and started on Fargate. A webhook redeploys on every push to the linked branch.
Typical build to live URL: 1 to 6 minutes depending on the stack. Builds time out after 60 minutes.
Type nginx:1.27, ghcr.io/you/app:v3 or any public image on Docker Hub, GitHub Container Registry, Quay or public Amazon ECR. No build stage. The listening port is read from the image; you can override it.
Public images run on x86-64 tasks. Private registries are not supported yet; use option 3 for a private image.
Build locally, run docker save -o app.tar app:tag, and upload the .tar, .tar.gz or .tgz (up to 2 GB). SnapDeploy loads it, pushes it to its private registry and deploys it. Nothing in your image leaves your control except the upload.
Uploaded images run on ARM64, so build them with docker build --platform linux/arm64. On Apple Silicon that is the default.
Container deployment on the GitHub path, because that is how most people use SnapDeploy for hosting Docker workloads. Docker-based hosting options with auto builds all need the same two things from your image: listen on the right port, and listen on all interfaces.
SnapDeploy sets a PORT environment variable in every container. Read it, and bind to every interface rather than localhost. A server that listens on 127.0.0.1 passes its own tests and fails every health check in the cloud.
// Node.js
app.listen(process.env.PORT || 3000, '0.0.0.0');
# Python (Flask, Gunicorn)
gunicorn --bind 0.0.0.0:$PORT app:appIf the app cannot read PORT, set the container port in the dashboard to whatever the app listens on. Either way works; the mismatch is what fails.
A multi-stage build keeps compilers and dev dependencies out of the image that ships. Smaller images pull faster, so the container starts faster and wakes faster. This one is for a Node.js service that compiles to dist/; the shape is the same for Go, Python or Java.
# syntax=docker/dockerfile:1
FROM node:20-alpine AS build
WORKDIR /app
COPY package*.json ./
RUN npm ci
COPY . .
RUN npm run build
FROM node:20-alpine
WORKDIR /app
ENV NODE_ENV=production
COPY --from=build /app/package*.json ./
RUN npm ci --omit=dev
COPY --from=build /app/dist ./dist
EXPOSE 3000
CMD ["node", "dist/server.js"]No Dockerfile? Skip this step. SnapDeploy detects Node.js, Python, Go, Ruby, PHP, Java and static sites and generates one. Commit your own when you need a system package, a specific base image or a custom start command.
Sign in, choose Deploy from GitHub, and pick the repository and branch. Add environment variables in the dashboard rather than in the image. Values whose names look like secrets are masked in the dashboard, PORT is reserved for the platform, and a build fails on purpose if a secret is placed under a public prefix such as NEXT_PUBLIC_, so it never ends up in browser JavaScript.
Everything here also works from an AI assistant: the MCP connector creates the container, sets variables and reads logs from Claude Code, Cursor, Codex or Gemini CLI.
The build runs on AWS CodeBuild and streams to the dashboard line by line. When the image is pushed, a Fargate task starts and the platform polls the health check on your port: / for most apps, /actuator/health for Spring Boot. The URL goes live the moment the check passes.
Later deploys are zero-downtime: the new task starts beside the old one, the load balancer waits for its health check, then traffic moves and the old task stops. A build that never becomes healthy leaves the previous version serving.
Every push to the linked branch rebuilds and redeploys. Prefer to build on your own machine, or need to ship a private image? Build for ARM64, save it and upload the tarball from the Docker Image Deployment screen:
docker build --platform linux/arm64 -t app:1.0 .
docker save -o app.tar app:1.0For an off-the-shelf image such as a status page or a proxy, type the image name and tag instead. No build, no repository, live in one to two minutes.
From SnapDeploy's own build logs since July 2026, most common first. None of these is specific to SnapDeploy; they break on every container hosting platform.
package.json, or a base image with no ARM64 build. The build log names the line. For Python builds that fail on a broken requirements.txt, the dashboard offers Smart Fix: it shows the change, commits it to your repository and retries the build.127.0.0.1. Step 1 above prevents this.dist/ while the start command serves build/, or a CMD that names a file the build never produced. Check the last COPY and the CMD against what the build actually wrote.A failed deploy never touches a running container, and failed attempts count toward the daily deploy limit, so read the log before retrying. The troubleshooting guide has the exact log lines for each case.
SnapDeploy is a container hosting platform, not a VPS: the platform owns the cluster, the proxy, the certificates and the restarts. Managed container hosting means you only own the image.
One container per task, never shared with other customers. Sizes: Small (512 MB, 0.25 vCPU), Medium (2 GB, 1 vCPU) and Large (4 GB, 2 vCPU). Change the size any time; Medium and Large run on an Always-On plan.
A *.containers.snapdeploy.app URL with a certificate on day one, a health check on your port, and automatic restarts when the process exits. Custom domains and WebSockets come with Always-On.
Build logs stream live, runtime logs and CPU/memory metrics are in the dashboard, and environment variables and secrets are set per container without rebuilding the image.
PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, Redis and RabbitMQ as add-ons, wired into the container's environment. Try any of them for $1 for 12 hours before subscribing.
The MCP connector lets Claude Code, Cursor, Codex or Gemini CLI deploy, read logs and set variables from the chat. Scoped tokens, and no token can delete anything.
Dedicated Tesla T4 ($499 a month) and A10G ($999 a month) instances for inference and training, with the same Dockerfile workflow and one-click PyTorch, Hugging Face and vLLM templates.
Flat prices per container, no usage metering, no bandwidth bill; fair-use traffic limits apply. The Docker hosting free tier is the first row; everything below it is a flat price. Cheap Docker hosting should be cheap to predict as well as cheap to buy.
| Plan | Price | Size | Runs 24/7 | Good for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0, no credit card | Small: 512 MB, 0.25 vCPU; up to 4 containers | No: sleeps after 15 min idle, 100 h/month, 10 deploys/day | Free container hosting for side projects, demos and learning Docker |
| Sprint Pack | $1 one-time | One Small container | Yes, for 24 hours; unlimited deploys | A launch day, a demo, a hackathon |
| Always-On Small | $12/month; $9.96/month annual | 512 MB, 0.25 vCPU | Yes | APIs, bots, webhooks, small web apps |
| Always-On Medium | $25/month; $20.75/month annual | 2 GB, 1 vCPU | Yes | Next.js, Django, Rails, Spring Boot |
| Always-On Large | $45/month; $37.35/month annual | 4 GB, 2 vCPU | Yes | JVM apps, heavy builds, small ML services |
| GPU T4 / A10G | $499 / $999 per month | Dedicated GPU, 16 GB / 24 GB VRAM | Yes | Inference, fine-tuning, LLM serving |
Free Docker container hosting comes with rules. The best Docker hosting for a project depends on these as much as on price, and most comparisons skip them. Here they are; the complete list is in the free-tier documentation.
One rule covers all of them: the container must answer HTTP on its port, because that is how the health check knows it is alive.
Express, FastAPI, Flask, Gin, Spring Boot. The biggest group. Free while you build it, Always-On Small once a mobile app or a front end depends on it.
Next.js, Django, Rails, Laravel, Nuxt. Medium is the usual size once server rendering and a database client share the process.
Stripe, GitHub and Slack call your endpoint when they feel like it, not when a browser is open. These belong on Always-On so the call never meets a sleeping container.
Each service gets its own container, URL, size and log stream. Lists of top platforms to host Docker microservices tend to assume Compose; here the services talk over HTTPS instead.
Admin panels, Streamlit and Gradio apps, Metabase-style reporting. Free-tier sleep is fine here: the first visitor of the day waits a minute, everyone after them does not.
A second container linked to a staging branch. It sleeps when nobody is reviewing and costs nothing while it does.
Run them on Always-On and give the process a tiny HTTP endpoint for the health check. A worker that never opens a port fails the health check and the deploy is marked failed.
Small models on a CPU container; anything with a GPU dependency on a dedicated T4 or A10G with the same Dockerfile workflow.
A status page, an uptime monitor, a documentation site or a reverse proxy pulled from Docker Hub by name. No repository, no build.
What a container hosting platform does for you that a shared VPS does not.
repo scope to list and clone your repositories and installs one webhook on each linked repository. Unlink a repository and the webhook is removed; revoke the authorisation from GitHub at any time.Searches for cheap Docker hosting or docker cloud hosting, and lists of the best platforms for hosting Docker containers, usually land on one of these five. Checked against each vendor's own pricing and docs pages on 26 September 2026. The full docker container hosting free tier comparison covers seven platforms in detail.
| Host | Free tier for a Docker container | Cheapest 24/7 container | Credit card at sign-up | Dockerfile builds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SnapDeploy | 4 containers, 100 h/month, 10 deploys/day; sleeps after 15 min idle | $12/month (512 MB, 0.25 vCPU); $1 for 24 h | No | Yes, plus public images and tarballs |
| Render | 750 h/month, 512 MB, 0.1 CPU; spins down after 15 min, about a minute to wake | $7/month Starter (512 MB, 0.5 CPU) | No | Yes |
| Railway | $5 trial for 30 days, then $1 of credit a month | $5/month Hobby plus usage | No (paid plans need a card) | Yes |
| Fly.io | Trial: 2 machine-hours or 7 days, then apps stop | About $1.94/month (256 MB shared) | Yes, to keep anything running | Yes |
| Koyeb | 1 service, 512 MB, 0.1 vCPU; scales to zero after 1 h idle | About $1.61/month (256 MB) | Yes, $29 pre-authorisation hold | Yes |
On raw monthly price, Koyeb and Fly.io are the cheapest Docker host in this table for a 24/7 container, and both need a card before anything runs. SnapDeploy's free tier is the only one here with no card, no trial expiry and a $1 path to 24 hours of Always-On. Sources: render.com/pricing and render.com/docs/free, railway.com/pricing, fly.io/pricing, koyeb.com/pricing.
Isolation: every SnapDeploy container, free tier included, runs as its own AWS Fargate task with a reserved 0.25 vCPU and 512 MB; AWS runs each task on a single-use, single-tenant compute instance. Fly.io and Koyeb also give each app its own VM or microVM; Render's free instance is 0.1 CPU and Railway's trial runs on shared vCPU cores (its own wording). Details in the Security and Isolation section below. Sources: aws.amazon.com/fargate/faqs, docs.fly.io/machines, koyeb.com/docs/reference/instances, docs.railway.com/pricing/free-trial, render.com/docs/compute-plans.
A Dockerfile is portable by design, which is the whole point of choosing Docker hosting over a platform-specific build. Connect the same repository, re-enter the environment variables, deploy, and point the domain at the new container once the health check is green. Most moves take one afternoon, and the old host keeps serving until you switch DNS.
Two things change on the way in. Apps that relied on a buildpack or a Heroku Procfile get a Dockerfile generated from the detected stack, or you commit your own. Anything that wrote to local disk needs a database add-on or object storage instead, because the filesystem here is ephemeral.
Any language, any framework. Without a Dockerfile these stacks are detected and get one generated.
Docker hosting is a service that runs your application as a Docker container on someone else's infrastructure. You supply an image or a Dockerfile; the host provides the machine, the network, HTTPS, restarts and logs. Managed Docker hosting such as SnapDeploy also removes the cluster: there is no server to patch and no Kubernetes to operate.
Yes. SnapDeploy's free tier runs up to 4 Docker containers with 100 running hours a month and 10 deploys a day, with no credit card. Free containers sleep after 15 minutes without traffic and wake in about 60 seconds when someone opens them in a browser. For a container that must run 24/7, Always-On starts at $12 a month.
Choose a VPS when you want root access and are happy to install Docker, a reverse proxy, certificates and monitoring yourself, and to patch the box. Choose managed Docker hosting when you want to hand over an image and get a URL. On a VPS you pay for the whole machine even when it idles; on SnapDeploy a free container costs nothing and an Always-On one is a flat monthly fee.
No. Kubernetes is for teams running many services across many machines. For one to a handful of containers, a managed container hosting platform gives you the parts you would build on Kubernetes anyway: isolation, health checks, restarts, HTTPS and rolling deploys, without the cluster to operate.
On SnapDeploy, Always-On Small is $12 a month per container (512 MB RAM, 0.25 vCPU), $9.96 a month on the annual plan, and a one-time $1 Sprint Pack keeps a container awake for 24 hours. Among the hosts we checked in September 2026, Koyeb's smallest paid instance is about $1.61 a month and Fly.io's about $1.94, both needing a credit card on file; Railway's Hobby plan is $5 a month plus usage; Render's Starter is $7.
Yes. Sign-up needs an email or a GitHub account only, so this is free Docker hosting without credit card details. A payment method is required only when you buy Always-On, a Sprint Pack, a database add-on or GPU time.
Yes. Connect GitHub once and pick any repository you have access to, public or private. A webhook redeploys the container on every push to the linked branch. Other branches are ignored, so a push to a feature branch does not touch production.
Not yet. Each deploy runs one container. Databases, caches and queues that a compose file would define as extra services are available as managed add-ons: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, Redis and RabbitMQ, each with a $1 12-hour trial.
Not directly yet. Public images from Docker Hub, GitHub Container Registry, Quay and public Amazon ECR work by name. For a private image, run docker save and upload the tarball; SnapDeploy pushes it to its own private registry and deploys it.
Images built from your repository or uploaded as a tarball run on ARM64 (AWS Graviton) Fargate tasks, so a Dockerfile must build for linux/arm64; most official base images are multi-architecture and just work. Public images pulled by name run on x86-64.
No. The container's filesystem is ephemeral: anything written to it is gone after a redeploy, a restart or a wake from sleep. Keep state in a managed database add-on or in object storage such as S3, and treat the container as replaceable.
Vertically, yes: move a container between Small, Medium and Large at any time. Horizontally, no: each container is one task, and there is no autoscaling that adds copies under load. If you are searching for the cheapest Docker hosting with autoscaling across many replicas, SnapDeploy is not that today.
No. A sleeping free container is woken by a browser visit. Scheduled jobs, webhooks and server-to-server calls that must always find the app running belong on an Always-On container, which never sleeps.
Yes. A Dockerfile moves as it is: connect the same repository, re-enter the environment variables and deploy. Apps that relied on a buildpack or a Procfile get a Dockerfile generated from the detected stack. The migration guides for each platform are linked at the end of this page.
Proud Member Of
Deploy free. 10 deploys a day, 100 hours a month, no credit card. Always-On from $12 a month when it has to stay up.
Deploy Free TodayThe first managed container PaaS to offer a one-time 24-hour Always-On pass under $5. Unlimited deploys + Always-On for one Small (512 MB) container — including WebSockets & real-time apps. No subscription, no auto-renewal. Stack two for 48 hours.
Need a managed database too? DB Sprint Pack — $1 / 12h for Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB, Mongo, Redis, or RabbitMQ.
