Where should you host the app your AI built?

Every week someone writes to us with the same question: which host should I use? They've read five articles and each one crowned a different winner. The uncomfortable truth is that there is no best host — there's a right one for what your app actually does.

The good news: the decision comes down to a handful of questions, and you can answer almost all of them without being technical.

1. Does your app have a server at all?

If it only shows pages — a marketing site, a portfolio, a landing page — it's static. Static is the easiest, cheapest case there is: near-free to run, loads instantly, and almost nothing to break.

If it has logins, saves data, or calls an AI, there's a server involved. Now you need a platform that runs code and watches it.

2. Where are your users?

Distance is time. If your audience is in Brazil and your server is in the United States, every click pays an invisible round-trip toll. Picking the right region usually buys more speed than weeks of code tuning.

3. Where does the database live?

This is the most expensive common mistake. The app sits on one platform, the database on another, the two on different continents — and every screen needs several round trips to reach it. App and database close together isn't a detail, it's the rule.

4. What does the bill look like when it works?

Every free tier is generous while nobody uses it. Before you commit, run the thought experiment: what if I had 10× today's traffic? Some platforms charge you a few dollars more. Others charge in a way that makes you cry.

5. Can you leave later?

Some platforms run your app as it is — if you want to move, you move in an afternoon. Others want the app rewritten their way, and then leaving becomes a project. No paranoia needed, but prefer the doors that stay unlocked.

The short version

No server: any modern static host will do, for almost nothing. Logins and a database: pick the platform that can run both the app and the database in the same region as your users, at a price that still makes sense at 10× the usage. That's it. The rest is preference.

If you'd rather not guess, we'll look at your app and give you the recommendation plus the reasoning — whether or not you hire us to run it.