Blog — page 19 of 38
The best Streamlit hosting platforms in 2026
Streamlit apps break on serverless hosts for a structural reason: the framework keeps a WebSocket open and holds your session state in the process. That narrows the list a lot.
The best edge function platforms in 2026
Edge functions buy you one thing: the code runs near the user. That's worth a lot for some workloads and almost nothing for others, and the runtime constraints are steep either way.
The best PlanetScale alternatives in 2026
People leave PlanetScale for four different reasons, and they lead to four different databases. Sorting out which one is yours saves you a migration you'll regret.
The best Firebase alternatives in 2026
Firebase isn't one product, it's six. Replacing it means deciding which of the six you actually use, because nothing else bundles the same set — and that's often a feature.
The best DigitalOcean App Platform alternatives in 2026
App Platform is a perfectly good PaaS that people outgrow in four predictable ways. Each one points at a different replacement, and one of them means you shouldn't leave at all.
The best Runloop alternatives in 2026
Agent sandbox providers all sell the same sentence — a secure VM your agent can use. The differences that decide it are boot latency, snapshot semantics, and what happens when the agent goes quiet for an hour.
How to Deploy a Remix App Without Docker
Remix builds to a plain Node server. Everything that goes wrong in a Remix deploy is one of four things, and none of them are solved by adding a container.
How to Roll Back a Bad Deployment
Rollback is easy for code and hard for everything else. The gap between those two facts is where most bad incidents actually happen.
Running live technical interviews on microVMs
During a 45-minute interview a stranger has a shell on your infrastructure, an editor, a Run button, and a strong incentive to be clever. A per-candidate Firecracker microVM makes that a boring fact instead of an incident.
Sandbox Mode for Your API: Give Every Customer a microVM
Most "sandbox modes" are one shared cluster with an is_test column. It works on day one and rots by month six. A real per-customer environment is a microVM running your actual API next to a real Postgres, forked from a seeded snapshot in under a second.
Rendering Untrusted Ad Creatives in Per-Tenant MicroVMs
Your creative-review pipeline renders HTML5 ad units from thousands of advertisers in one shared headless-Chrome farm. That farm is a giant C++ attack surface executing code that strangers paid to have you execute. Give every creative its own microVM.
Firecracker vCPU Hotplug, and How CPU Scaling Actually Works
Somebody always asks for "more CPU" on a running microVM. Firecracker's answer is no — vcpu_count is fixed before InstanceStart and frozen into every snapshot. The good news: the lever you actually wanted was never vCPU count in the first place.
Firecracker Guest MTU and Network Tuning Explained
The sandbox has network. DNS resolves, TLS completes, health checks return 200. Then the first large response arrives and the connection goes silent forever. This is a path-MTU black hole, and every diagnostic you reach for first is small enough to fit.
Modal vs Daytona for AI Agent Code Execution
Modal is built around a function you wrote. Daytona is built around a machine your agent works in. Almost every argument about which is better is really an argument about which shape your workload has — and there's a third shape neither is centred on.
Vercel Sandbox vs E2B for AI-Generated Code
Vercel Sandbox and E2B land on the same shortlist and are not the same shape of product. One is ephemeral compute inside a platform you already deploy to; the other is a standalone sandbox API built for agents. Here's how they differ on the axes that actually bite.
The Best Replit Alternatives in 2026
"Replit alternative" means three unrelated things: a browser IDE, a cloud dev environment, or the sandbox API that runs untrusted code under the hood. Split the intent first and the shortlist collapses from ten options to two.
Side-channel attacks in multi-tenant compute, explained
Your isolation boundary is enforced in the architectural world: page tables, privilege rings, VM exits. Underneath it sits a second computer — caches, branch predictors, store buffers — that is shared by everyone and respects none of those lines. Here's what leaks, what the mitigations cost, and the honest limit of what a microVM fixes.
Memory Prefetch: The Working Set Is the Real Unit of a Fast Restore
A userfaultfd restore doesn't make latency disappear — it shreds it into thousands of tiny page faults and sprinkles them over the guest's first few seconds. The fix isn't a faster fault handler. It's knowing which pages the guest will want, and fetching them before it asks.
Tidal: Turning the Host Into a Cache, and Paying for the Seconds You Touch
Committed capacity is the address space; the working set is what deserves host RAM. We rebuilt our compute layer around cache semantics — burst freely when the host is quiet, fair-share when it isn't, and a bill that meters the seconds you actually touch.
Launch: 8 Burstable vCPUs Everywhere, and You Only Pay for Active Seconds
Every sandbox and app now boots with 8 burstable vCPUs, and the bill meters the CPU-seconds you actually burn and the memory you actually keep resident. Live for everyone today.
The best Next.js hosting platforms in 2026
Every Next.js hosting comparison starts with Vercel and works outward apologetically. The useful question is narrower: which parts of Next.js does your app actually use, and which platforms implement those parts rather than approximating them.
The best Python hosting platforms in 2026
Python hosting comparisons usually rank platforms on price. The thing that actually decides your shortlist is duller: how your app concurrency model, your background workers, and your native dependencies interact with the platform's process model.
The best Express and Node.js hosting platforms in 2026
An Express API is the easiest thing in the world to deploy and one of the easiest to deploy badly. Here's what separates the platforms, and the four properties of your app that pick the category for you.
The best Go hosting platforms in 2026
Go's deployment story is a single binary with no runtime to install, which quietly invalidates half of what hosting platforms advertise. What's left is a shorter, more interesting list of differences.