Railway vs. VPS Hosting

At a high level, both Railway and a VPS (Virtual Private Server) can be used to deploy applications. The fundamental difference lies in the level of abstraction and operational overhead you're willing to manage.

VPS hosting providers like AWS EC2, DigitalOcean Droplets, Hetzner Cloud, Linode, or Vultr give you a virtual machine where you have full control over the operating system, software stack, and configuration. This offers maximum flexibility but requires significant DevOps expertise and ongoing maintenance.

Railway provides a fully managed platform that abstracts away infrastructure complexity while giving you the flexibility of a dedicated environment. You get VPS-level control without the operational burden.

Quick Comparison: VPS vs. Railway

Infrastructure & Operational Overhead

VPS Hosting

When you choose VPS hosting, you're essentially becoming your own infrastructure team. This means taking full responsibility for:

Server Setup & Configuration

• Installing and configuring the operating system (Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, etc.)
• Applying security patches and system updates
• Configuring firewalls, SSH access, and user management
• Installing and configuring web servers (Nginx, Apache)
• Setting up reverse proxies and load balancers
• Managing SSL certificates and renewals

Application Environment Management

• Installing/managing programming runtimes (Node.js, Python, Go, etc.)
• Setting up process managers (PM2, systemd, supervisor)
• Configuring environment variables and secrets management
• Managing database installs/configs (MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, etc.)
• Setting up caching layers (Redis, Memcached)

System Administration

• Monitoring disk space, memory usage, CPU performance
• Managing log rotation and aggregation
• Automated backups and disaster recovery planning
• Applying vulnerability patches
• DNS configuration and domain setup

You’ll need to continuously maintain and update this stack, troubleshoot outages, and scale resources as needed.

Railway

Railway eliminates this operational burden:

Zero-Configuration Deployment

• Deploy directly from GitHub with automatic builds

• Auto-detects dependencies and installs them
• Built-in support for major programming languages and frameworks
• Automatic SSL provisioning and renewal
• Health checks and automatic restarts

Managed Infrastructure

• Railway owns/operates underlying hardware
• Automatic OS/security patches
• Built-in load balancing and traffic distribution via service replicas
• Automatic scaling based on workload demand
• Managed networking with private service communication

Security & Compliance

VPS Hosting

Security is entirely your responsibility, including:

Basic Security Hardening

• Disable root login, enforce SSH key auth
• Configure firewalls (UFW/iptables)
• Install intrusion detection (fail2ban, IDS)
• Regular audits and patching

Application Security

• File permissions and ownership
• Secure headers (HSTS, CSP, X-Frame-Options)
• Rate limiting and DDoS protection
• Secure secret management
• Secure database connections

Compliance Requirements

Achieving certifications on VPS requires significant additional work:

• Access controls and audit logging
• Data classification/handling procedures
• Incident response/business continuity plans
• Security assessments & penetration testing
• Evidence collection and documentation
• Encryption/key management systems

This typically requires dedicated expertise and can be costly.

Railway

Railway provides enterprise-grade security out of the box:

Built-in Security Features

• Encrypted secret/environment management

• SSL/TLS encryption for all services
• Private networking within projects
• Automatic patches and updates
• DDoS protection

Compliance & Certifications

• SOC 2 Type II
• GDPR compliance
• HIPAA compliance
• Regular third-party audits

Security Best Practices

• Role-based access control

• MFA and passkey support
• Regular assessments and penetration testing
• Incident response and continuity planning

Monitoring & Observability

VPS Hosting

Requires integrating multiple tools:

System & Application Monitoring

• Install agents (Prometheus, Grafana, commercial tools)
• Custom dashboards for CPU, memory, disk, network
• Configure alerting rules and notification channels
• Implement log aggregation/analysis (ELK, Loki)
• Uptime monitoring and health checks

Railway

Monitoring is built-in:

Observability Dashboard

• CPU, memory, network metrics

• Integrated log aggregation and search

• Auto alerting and notifications

Scalability & Global Distribution

VPS Hosting

Scaling requires manual setup:

Vertical Scaling (Up)

• Manually upgrade to larger instances
• Typically downtime during resizing
• Application restarts required

Horizontal Scaling (Out)

• Provision additional VPS instances
• Configure load balancers (HAProxy, Nginx, cloud LB)
• Manage session persistence/sticky sessions
• Database connection pooling/discovery

Multi-Region Deployment Challenges

• Manual VPS setup in each region
• Complex DNS/georouting configs
• Data replication/sync complexity
• Cross-region latency
• Higher operational overhead and cost

Railway

Scaling and distribution are automatic:

Automatic Vertical Scaling

• Scale up to plan limits automatically
• No downtime or manual intervention

Effortless Horizontal Scaling

• Deploy replicas with one click

• Automatic load balancing & health checks

• Automatic traffic routing to nearest region

Multi-Region Deployment

• Deploy globally with one command
• Auto traffic routing, failover, replication
• CDN integration for static assets
• Simplified data management
• Reduced latency for global users

Pricing & Cost Optimization

VPS Hosting

• Fixed monthly pricing by instance size.
• Extra tools (monitoring, backups, scaling) often add hidden costs.

Railway

Railway follows a usage-based pricing model that depends on how long your service runs and the amount of resources it consumes. You only pay for activce CPU and memory, not for idle time.

Active compute time x compute size (memory and CPU)

Pricing plans start at $5/month. You can check out the pricing page for more details.

Cost Optimization

If you would like to further reduce costs, you can enable the serverless feature. When a service has no outbound requests for over 10 minutes, it is automatically put to sleep. While asleep, the service incurs no compute charges. It wakes up on the next incoming request, ensuring seamless reactivation without manual effort. This makes it ideal for sporadic or bursty workloads, giving you the flexibility of a full server with the cost efficiency of serverless, with the benefit of only paying when your code is running.

Developer Workflow & Deployment

VPS Hosting

Deploying requires building your own CI/CD:

CI/CD

• Configure GitHub Actions/Jenkins/etc.
• Write deployment scripts
• Separate staging/production setup
• Automated testing/quality gates
• Rollback procedures

Environment Management

• Manual env var config
• Separate servers for staging/prod
• Manual DB migrations/schema updates
• Complex secret management

Railway

CI/CD and environments are built-in:

Automatic CI/CD

• GitHub repo integration
• Preview environments per pull request
• One-click rollbacks
• Automatic env var management

Environment Management

• Built-in support for dev/staging/prod

• Shared env vars across services
• Encrypted secret management
• Auto DB migrations/schema updates by customizing the pre-deploy command

Railway as a VPS Alternative: Migrate from VPS to Railway

To get started, create an account on Railway. You can sign up for free and receive $5 in credits to try out the platform.

Deploying your app

1. Choose "Deploy from GitHub repo", connect your GitHub account, and select the repo you would like to deploy.

2. If your project is using any environment variables or secrets:
   1. Click on the deployed service.
   2. Navigate to the “Variables” tab.
   3. Add a new variable by clicking the “New Variable” button. Alternatively, you can import a .env file by clicking “Raw Editor” and adding all variables at once.

3. To make your project accessible over the internet, you will need to configure a domain:
   1. From the project’s canvas, click on the service you would like to configure.
   2. Navigate to the “Settings” tab.
   3. Go to the “Networking” section.
   4. You can either:
      1. Generate a Railway service domain: this will make your app available under a .up.railway.app domain.
      2. Add a custom domain: follow the DNS configuration steps.

Need help or have questions?

If you need help along the way, the Railway Discord and Help Station are great resources to get support from the team and community.

Working with a larger workload or have specific requirements? Book a call with the Railway team to explore how we can best support your project.