Choosing the Right Hosting Provider
Best Hosting Providers for Rails PWAs
- Heroku – Simple deployment, automatic scaling, but limited file storage.
- Render – Similar to Heroku but offers free static hosting.
- Hetzner / DigitalOcean / Linode / AWS EC2 – Full control over the server but requires manual setup.
- Fly.io – Optimized for Rails applications with built-in support for WebSockets.
I personally use Hetzner VPS to host all my personal and professional software projects because I get 100% control over my server.
You can use Digitalocean or Linode too BUT Hetzner provides same config VPS at half the price than these.
Why Hetzner for Rails PWA?
Hetzner Cloud is an excellent hosting option for Rails 8 Progressive Web Apps because it provides:
- Affordable yet powerful VPS instances with dedicated resources.
- Full control over the server for containerized deployments.
- Built-in support for Docker, which Kamal 2 leverages.
Setting Up a Hetzner VPS for Rails 8 Deployment
Create a Hetzner Cloud VPS
- Select Ubuntu 24.04 as the OS.
- Choose at least 2 vCPUs and 4GB RAM for smooth performance.
- Enable dedicated IPv4 and IPv6.
Connect to the VPS
ssh root@your-server-ip
No further manual setup is needed because Kamal 2 will handle Docker installation and server configuration automatically when you run kamal setup.