Craft Cloud vs my $6 VPS: what first-party serverless actually buys you
I host this blog on a small OVH VPS that costs about the price of a coffee a month, so when I started on Craft and saw it has its own first-party hosting — Craft Cloud — my reflex was the self-hoster's sneer: why would I pay someone to run what I can run myself? Having actually looked at it, the honest answer is that Craft Cloud isn't competing with my VPS. It's competing with my weekends and my bus factor, and that's a fairer fight than I wanted it to be.
What it actually is
Craft Cloud is Pixel & Tonic's own serverless, CDN-backed hosting, built specifically for Craft. The shape of it: git-based deploys (connect GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket, deploy on push or manually), each environment mapped to a branch with its own managed database, asset storage, env vars, logs, and a preview domain. The database is managed MySQL 8 or Postgres, one per environment, with no cap on database size, page views, or content volume. Assets live in their object storage, transfer from their edge/CDN to your visitors is free, and there are nightly backups retained for 30 days, across US, Canadian, European, and Asia-Pacific regions. There's a 7-day trial, and it's billed monthly or yearly through Stripe.
(I'm deliberately not quoting a monthly price. Their pricing page is behind a bot wall I couldn't read cleanly, and I'm not going to publish a hosting figure I haven't verified with my own eyes — the numbers you'll see thrown around for "$279/$399" are the Craft CMS license editions, which are a separate thing from Cloud hosting. Check the live page for the actual Cloud rate.)
The self-hoster's real calculus
Here's where I had to be honest with myself. My VPS wins, decisively, on the axes I usually brag about: raw cost (a fraction of any managed tier), total control (I own the box, the Traefik config, the cron, the backups), and density (I can run a dozen small sites on one droplet). If the question is "cheapest way to serve a hobby blog," self-hosting isn't close.
But that's not the question Craft Cloud is answering. Its pitch is that serverless compute, a first-party CDN, git-push deploys, and 30-day nightly backups erase an ops surface that a solo developer quietly pays for — in the weekend spent patching, the evening lost to a full disk, the low-grade anxiety of being the only person who knows how the box is wired. That's the bus factor, and on a client site it has a dollar value my ego doesn't want to admit.
Managed hosting isn't competing with your server's price. It's competing with the cost of you being the only person who can fix the server at 2am — and on a client project, that cost is real money.
The part a self-hoster should actually worry about
The abstractions that make Cloud pleasant are also the lock-in, and this is the bit I'd want stated plainly before anyone migrates. Your assets live in their object storage, so an existing site needs a real migration to get in (and to get out). The database is theirs. And "serverless" means there is no box to SSH into — for a Drupal dev whose entire mental model is "drush on a real server," that's a genuinely different posture. You trade the ability to poke at anything for never having to. That's a good trade right up until the day you need to poke at something.
So my verdict, from the coffee-priced-VPS chair: for a hobby blog, self-hosting stays the rational call and I'm keeping mine. Craft Cloud earns its keep the moment a client's uptime and a signed SLA are worth more than the monthly fee and the freedom to move — which, for a lot of professional Craft work, they genuinely are. The mistake isn't paying for managed hosting. The mistake is paying for it out of laziness on a project where you'd have happily owned the box, or self-hosting out of pride on a project where an outage costs a client real money. Match the hosting to the stakes, not to your identity as a self-hoster.