Hetzner was cheaper at every size I tested and I still chose managed Postgres
Twelve pricing tabs open. Neon, Hetzner, Supabase, Prisma, Scaleway, OVH. My database is half a gigabyte. I was comparing ten-terabyte price curves. At some point this week I typed the words "I am super lost here" about my own infrastructure. I advise companies on this exact class of decision. That sentence still came out of my hands. If you have ever spent an evening deep in provider pricing pages for a workload that fits on a USB stick from 2009, this one is for you. All numbers below come from the live pricing pages as of July 2026. Rates move, so verify before you commit. Three fears, all pointed at the wrong layers I went in worried about getting attacked, running out of space, and being locked in. All three dissolved under ten minutes of honest reading. DDoS lands on the website edge, not the database. My site already sits behind Cloudflare and Vercel, and a database is never publicly exposed. Only the app talks to it. Whichever provider I picked, that attack surface stayed identical. Here is the shape of the stack, and where each fear lives. MANAGED (what I run today) visitors ──> Cloudflare edge ──> Vercel app ──> managed Postgres [DDoS absorbed] [stateless] [never public, app-only access, provider patches, provider backups, provider on-call] SELF-HOSTED (the alternative I priced) visitors ──> Cloudflare edge ──> Vercel app ──> Hetzner CAX11 [DDoS absorbed] [stateless] [Postgres :5432 firewalled to app, SSH hardened, fail2ban + auto- patching = MINE] │ pg_dump every 6h ▼ encrypted ────> Cloudflare R2 [off-site copies] Same edge, same app, same attack surface. Everything in the right-hand box is what changes owners. Storage was a rounding error. My data is 0.5 GB. Even the cheapest self-hosted box includes 40 GB, eighty times headroom before the first extra cent. Lock-in was a phantom too. Managed Postgres is still stock Postgres. Exiting means a dump, a restore, and one connection string change in the deployment environment. Minutes of cutover, no rewrite an