Your requirement
Cheapest production-ready Docker hosting
Not the cheapest that runs a container. The cheapest you would put in front of users.
What a plan needs to be listed
Always-on, paid, public container records at a minimum 1 vCPU and 2 GB RAM. This is a cost-candidate predicate, not proof of production readiness.
A plan reaches the table below only if all of this is true of it:
- It is a serverless container plan.
- It is a paid plan, not a free tier.
- It is the always-on shape of that plan, not one that scales to zero between requests.
- The vendor publishes a monthly price for it.
- Its published size is at least 1 vCPU and 2 GB.
- A public IPv4 address is included.
- This rule finds cost candidates. The dataset cannot prove production readiness, and this page does not claim to.
Plans that qualify
| Provider | Plan | vCPU | RAM | Disk | Transfer | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Koyeb | always-on Checked 16 Oct 2026 1 vCPU · 2 GB · no disk 100 GB transfer, price recorded 25 Jul 2026 | 1 | 2 GB | none | 100 GB | $10.51 |
| Fly.io | always-on Not in the ranking: we could not find this price on Fly.io's page 1 vCPU · 2 GB · no disk 0 GB transfer, price recorded 9 Oct 2026 | 1 | 2 GB | none | 0 GB | $12.88 |
| Alibaba Cloud | always-on Not in the ranking: we could not find this price on Alibaba Cloud's page; last confirmed too long ago 1 vCPU · 2 GB · no disk 0 GB transfer, price recorded 25 Jul 2026 | 1 | 2 GB | none | 0 GB | $25.28 |
| Amazon Web Services | always-on Not in the ranking: we could not find this price on Amazon Web Services's page; last confirmed too long ago 1 vCPU · 2 GB · no disk 100 GB transfer, price recorded 25 Jul 2026 | 1 | 2 GB | none | 100 GB | $36.04 |
Plans that just miss
These came close enough to be worth knowing about. Some meet the broad requirement above but miss a narrower one; the last column says which. Listing them shows that a missing plan was checked, not forgotten.
| Provider | Plan | What it misses | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Koyeb | Free | Not a paid plan, Not always on, Below minimum resources | $0.00 |
| Render | Free web service | Not a paid plan, Not always on, Below minimum resources | $0.00 |
| IONOS | VPS S+ | Not a container service | $2.00 |
| Railway | Hobby | Not a container service, No fixed always-on instance price | $5.00 |
What actually decides this
The dataset can identify cheap always-on container cost candidates, but it cannot prove that any record is production-ready. The executable filter requires a paid serverless-container record, an always-on scenario, at least 1 vCPU and 2 GB RAM, a known monthly total, and public ingress. Four records pass: Koyeb, Fly, Alibaba ECI, and AWS Fargate. That is the honest comparison envelope.
The current table ranks the derived single-container cost floors from the bundle. Those floors do not include a second replica, managed database, persistent disk, log retention, support, or a load balancer unless the underlying product already internalizes that function.
Free rows fail for concrete reasons. Render spins a free web service down after 15 idle minutes, uses an ephemeral filesystem, and does not allow scaling beyond one instance. Koyeb's free instance scales to zero, cannot run workers, and cannot attach volumes. A low-price IONOS VPS is a valid self-managed alternative, but that boundary transfers patching, Docker upgrades, firewalling, backups, monitoring, and recovery to the buyer.
Use this page to establish a cost floor, then run the production-readiness check. Confirm image support, restart policy, health checks, rollout and rollback behavior, secret storage, persistent data design, metrics, logs, support, and failure domains. If one instance is acceptable, say so. If two zones are required, price two instances and the routing layer. Do not label the lowest always-on row production-ready until those facts are sourced. Today the data supports a cheapest candidate, not a final production winner.
How to check this yourself
Every price here is read from the provider's own page and carries the date we read it, most recently 9 Oct 2026. The requirements above list every check we applied, so you can disagree with a threshold rather than guess at it. How we calculate the bill, and download the data if you would rather run your own.
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