I moved 4 personal websites with a total of 7 services to railway.app (no affiliation) this weekend and was very impressed with how simple it was. Previously these websites were hosted using a combination of GitHub Pages + Heroku + Fly.io but it’s nice to have all of them hosted in a consistent way now.
I vastly preferred the railway.app migration to the fly.io migration but fly.io feels much more production ready than railway. This isn’t a big deal as none of the projects I moved have paying users so downtime would be acceptable if it happens. I was able to deploy all of my applications from the UI without ever having to install any company specific CLI which I prefer. Railway being such a small company has lacking docs and is very difficult to google for specific question about the provider —- most “railwayapp” google responses are for actual railways. Pretty much everything was intuitive and didn’t require the docs though which was much more pleasant than my experiences with fly.io.
To get the custom domains working I had to move my DNS to cloudflare for all sites which was something I had planned on doing anyways but felt annoying in the moment. I was previously using my domain registrar’s (namecheap) DNS but they don’t seem to support CNAME flattening which allows for CNAME apex domain entries which were required for getting custom domains on railway.
I moved all of the services in about a day and everything has been running pretty well. I do think railway is slower than fly but everything is still plenty fast so far. All projects have automatic github deployments which have been working well so far. Overall for a new project made by a small team I have really really enjoyed using railway for hosting. Railway is organized in a way that matches how I think about project hosting and most things seem well thought out with lots of good stuff still coming.
Yeah railway's pricing is super confusing -- it will be interesting to see what the total for my (very low traffic) websites will at the end of the month. On the dashboard it currently estimates my total bill for all sites to be $2.82 which means I'll be under their $5/mo free credit.
At least they have a very convenient single page where I can see the total for all projects at one time.
I vastly preferred the railway.app migration to the fly.io migration but fly.io feels much more production ready than railway. This isn’t a big deal as none of the projects I moved have paying users so downtime would be acceptable if it happens. I was able to deploy all of my applications from the UI without ever having to install any company specific CLI which I prefer. Railway being such a small company has lacking docs and is very difficult to google for specific question about the provider —- most “railwayapp” google responses are for actual railways. Pretty much everything was intuitive and didn’t require the docs though which was much more pleasant than my experiences with fly.io.
To get the custom domains working I had to move my DNS to cloudflare for all sites which was something I had planned on doing anyways but felt annoying in the moment. I was previously using my domain registrar’s (namecheap) DNS but they don’t seem to support CNAME flattening which allows for CNAME apex domain entries which were required for getting custom domains on railway.
I moved all of the services in about a day and everything has been running pretty well. I do think railway is slower than fly but everything is still plenty fast so far. All projects have automatic github deployments which have been working well so far. Overall for a new project made by a small team I have really really enjoyed using railway for hosting. Railway is organized in a way that matches how I think about project hosting and most things seem well thought out with lots of good stuff still coming.
The websites moved were https://trentprynn.com https://habitapper.com https://weightwatchapp.com https://samueldebartolo.com
these are all open source and can be viewed from my github https://github.com/trentprynn