Hostinger vs Railway: metered containers or a flat plan

Railway is the closest thing to a fair fight for a flat shared plan. It is not serverless, it does not bill per seat, and it meters what your container actually used rather than what you reserved — so for a small always-on app the two land far closer than the usual "PaaS is expensive" story suggests.

Here is the arithmetic, and the four things that decide it once the prices stop being the interesting part.

Disclosure: we publish this, we host wacrm on Hostinger, and the Hostinger links are referral links. Railway's rates below come from its public pricing page, checked in August 2026.

The short version

• Choose Railway if you want containers: a Dockerfile, a Postgres or Redis instance next to the app, a background worker as its own service, and room to scale a service far past what shared hosting offers. Billing is monthly, with no prepaid term.
• Choose Hostinger if a Next.js app plus a database is the whole shape of the problem, and you would rather have a domain, mail, backups and support arrive in the same plan at a fixed price.

What Railway charges

	Rate
Hobby plan	$5/month, including $5 of usage credit
Pro plan	$20/month per workspace, including $20 of credit — seats are free
vCPU	$0.00000772 per vCPU-second (about $0.0278 per vCPU-hour)
Memory	$0.00000386 per GB-second (about $0.0139 per GB-hour)
Egress	$0.05 per GB

Two things to like here. Seats are free — the fee is per workspace, so a team of five costs the same as one, which is the opposite of most platforms. And billing is per second against actual usage, so an app that idles cheaply really is cheap.

The trial is $5 of credit for 30 days rather than an ongoing free tier, which is worth knowing if you are reading older comparisons.

What that means for a real app

A Next.js app that stays awake and serves modest traffic — call it an average of 0.35 vCPU and 1 GB of memory, with 60 GB of egress:

	Monthly
vCPU · 0.35 × 720 hrs × $0.0278	$7.00
Memory · 1 GB × 720 hrs × $0.0139	$10.00
Egress · 60 GB × $0.05	$3.00
Hobby fee ($5, includes $5 credit)	$5.00
Credit applied	−$5.00
Total	$20.00

A quieter app that idles near 0.1 vCPU and 400 MB fits inside the $5 Hobby credit and costs $5. A busier one scales linearly — double the memory, add $10.

Against that, a Hostinger managed Node.js plan is $3.99/month on a 48-month term and $16.99/month at renewal, with two cores, 3 GB of RAM, unlimited bandwidth, and five app slots. On the renewal price the two are close enough that price alone should not decide it.

The four things that actually decide it

1. Do you need containers? This is the real question. Railway runs your image, so a Dockerfile, a Go sidecar, a Python worker, a managed Postgres and a Redis all live in one project with private networking between them. A managed Node.js plan runs a Node process and gives you MySQL. If your architecture is more than "app plus database", Railway is not a luxury.

2. How does the bill behave when you are wrong? Railway's meter follows a memory leak or a runaway loop upward. Hostinger's does not — you hit the plan's ceiling and responses slow down instead. Neither is strictly better: one costs money without asking, the other costs performance without asking.

3. How long do you want to commit? Hostinger's headline price needs a long prepaid term; that is the trade for the number being that low, and shorter terms cost more per month. Railway is month to month. If you are not sure the project survives the quarter, that flexibility has real value.

4. What else is in the plan? A first-year domain, email, managed SSL, daily backups and 24/7 support come with the Hostinger plan. On Railway each of those is something you buy or run elsewhere. Add them up before calling the prices equal.

Where Railway is clearly better

• Vertical headroom. A single service can scale to far more CPU and memory than any shared plan, without you migrating anything.
• Databases as a first-class thing. One click for Postgres or Redis, with backups and private networking, instead of adapting to the MySQL that came with the plan.
• Background workers. A separate always-on consumer process is a service, not a workaround.
• Preview environments. Per-branch environments are built in.
• Developer experience. Logs, metrics, and rollbacks are good, and the CLI is pleasant.

Where the flat plan is better

• Predictability. The number does not move, so you can quote a client a hosting cost and be right in month nine.
• Several apps, one bill. Five web apps and 50 websites on the Business plan. On Railway every app is its own metered service.
• Bandwidth. Unlimited, versus $0.05/GB. At 500 GB a month that is $25 of egress on Railway and nothing here.
• Support and backups included. Not a technical argument, but the one that matters at 2am.

Moving between them

A plain Next.js app with an external database moves in either direction in an afternoon: build with npm run build, serve with next start, carry the environment variables, repoint DNS. What does not move cleanly off Railway is anything container-shaped — a custom Dockerfile, extra services, or a Railway-managed Postgres. Those need a managed equivalent, a rewrite onto the plan's MySQL, or a VPS, where you run Docker yourself and become the sysadmin.

The honest bottom line

Railway is a better platform and Hostinger is a cheaper, calmer bill. If your app is a Next.js front end with Supabase or another hosted database behind it — which is exactly what wacrm is — the flat plan covers it and the savings are real but modest. The moment you want a second service, a queue worker, or a database you control, Railway earns its meter.

Sizing up the plans first? The plan guide compares the three tiers, and Hostinger vs Vercel covers the same question against a per-seat, metered platform.