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App hosting and deployment

Git push, build, health-check, switch traffic — the deploy loop is simple until it is not. These posts cover deploying specific frameworks, self-hosting common open-source tools, PaaS trade-offs, and running apps on microVMs that sleep when idle.

Git-driven app hosting on PandaStack

150 posts

·11 min read

Best bare metal providers for Firecracker in 2026

Firecracker needs /dev/kvm, and that one requirement disqualifies most of the cheap compute on the market. The three tiers of hosting that can actually run it, what each gets wrong, and the 60-second check to run before you sign anything.

firecrackerbare-metalinfrastructure
Ajay Kumar
·11 min read

Server-Side Rendering Someone Else's React Component

If your product server-renders components your customers wrote, you are running their code in your process, with your env vars and your database socket. node:vm is a sandbox for values, not for a module graph that can require("fs"). Here is the boundary that actually holds, and what it costs.

ssrreactnodejs
Ajay Kumar
·10 min read

GitOps for Ephemeral Compute: Where Reconciliation Stops

Argo CD's entire personality is refusing to let you delete things. That is exactly the right instinct for a database StatefulSet and exactly the wrong one for a sandbox that was always going to die in forty seconds.

gitopsargocdflux
Ajay Kumar
·10 min read

Multi-Tenant WordPress Hosting on Firecracker MicroVMs

WordPress is a plugin-execution engine wearing a CMS costume, which makes shared hosting a multi-tenant remote code execution service with good branding. A look at why the PHP hardening stack is not a boundary, and what changes when every site gets its own kernel.

wordpressphpmulti-tenant
Ajay Kumar
·10 min read

How to Put a CDN in Front of a Scale-to-Zero App

An origin that is allowed to sleep changes what your cache headers are for. Done properly, the wake happens in a background fetch and lands on nobody's request; done carelessly, one Vary header hands every visitor a cold boot.

cdncachingscale-to-zero
Ajay Kumar
·10 min read

The best ways to host OpenHands in 2026

OpenHands is two workloads sharing a hostname: a cheap, mostly-idle control app, and a runtime that executes whatever the model just decided to type. Most hosting advice answers the first question and quietly gets the second one wrong.

openhandsai-agentscomparison
Ajay Kumar
·11 min read

The Best Prefect Hosting Platforms in 2026

Almost every 'how do I host Prefect' thread is two questions wearing one coat: where does the server live, and where do flow runs actually execute? They have different answers, and the second one is the one that costs money.

comparisonprefectorchestration
Ajay Kumar
·11 min read

The Best Metabase Hosting Platforms in 2026

Running metabase.jar takes five seconds. Running it in production means an application database that is not H2, a heap the kernel agrees with, and a SQL console you have not accidentally published.

comparisonmetabasebusiness-intelligence
Ajay Kumar
·11 min read

The best ways to host MLflow in 2026

MLflow looks like a web app and is actually a database, a bucket, and a code-distribution channel wearing one name. An honest look at where to put each part — including where we're the wrong answer.

mlflowmlopsself-hosting
Ajay Kumar

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