What it actually costs to run a managed hosting service

Before I started charging money for ezhost, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what other hosting providers actually pay for their infrastructure. Nobody tells you. Pricing pages everywhere, cost pages nowhere.

So here's mine.

The server

Everything currently runs on one machine in a German data center:

That's it. That's the fleet. When it fills up, I add a second node.

How I split the costs

CPU is shared between all containers, so I don't charge for it separately. The whole server cost gets divided by usable RAM. I plan with 85% utilization, because running a box at 100% RAM is how you get woken up at 3am.

What that means per plan

Looks comfortable, right? It shrinks fast. Prices include VAT, Stripe takes its cut, and both come off the top before I see anything. Here's where a €5 Starter actually goes:

And that green part has to pay for the actual product, which isn't RAM. It's me handling updates, backups, and the occasional app that decides to eat its own database. One hour of support on a Starter plan wipes out about a year of margin on that customer. The infrastructure is the cheap part of managed hosting. It always was.

Why flat plans instead of per-app pricing

Most services in this space charge per app. That's fine if you run one thing. But self-hosting is a gateway drug — you start with one app and six months later you're running nine. Per-app pricing punishes exactly the people who like this stuff most.

So ezhost sells you a resource budget instead. Starter fits up to 5 apps in 1 GB. Pro and up have no app limit at all; you're only bounded by RAM.

What you should know before trusting me with anything

• It's one node. Daily restic backups go offsite and I've actually tested restoring from them, but there's no hot failover. If the server dies, recovery is measured in hours, not seconds.
• I'm one person, in Switzerland, doing this alongside a day job. Support is fast in the evening (European time) and slower at 10am.
• The service launched in July 2026. There are no testimonials on the site because nobody has used it long enough to give one, and I'm not going to invent them.

Questions about the numbers are welcome — it's my favorite topic. You'll reach me at support@ezhost.app.