What is PaaS (Platform as a Service)?
PaaS, or Platform as a Service, is hosting where you supply the code and the provider supplies everything under it: the operating system, the runtime, the web server and the deployment pipeline. You push a repository, the platform builds and runs it. Heroku, Railway, Render and InstaPods are all PaaS products.
What is the difference between IaaS, PaaS and SaaS?
The three differ by how much of the stack you operate. IaaS gives you a bare machine and you run everything on it. PaaS gives you a place to push code and runs the machine for you. SaaS gives you a finished application and you run nothing at all. The line moves with how much control you want to keep.
| Model | You manage | Provider manages | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| IaaS | OS, runtime, app, patching | Hardware, network | A Hetzner or DigitalOcean VPS |
| PaaS | Your app code | OS, runtime, web server, deploys | Heroku, Railway, InstaPods |
| SaaS | Nothing | Everything | Notion, Zapier |
Heroku, the product that popularised PaaS, ended its free dyno tier on 28 November 2022, which pushed a generation of hobby apps onto paid platforms. Source: Heroku pricing announcement, August 2022
Is serverless the same as PaaS?
No. Serverless is a billing and execution model where code runs per request and scales to zero. PaaS is about who operates the stack. A PaaS can run your app as a long-lived process on a server, which is what lets background workers, cron jobs and WebSockets work normally instead of needing a separate product.
This is the practical fork in the road. If your app is a request-in, response-out API, serverless is fine. If it has a queue worker, a scheduled job, an open socket, or files on disk, a persistent server is the shorter path.
What does PaaS cost?
Most PaaS products bill by usage: CPU seconds, memory-hours, bandwidth and build minutes, added up at the end of the month. InstaPods bills flat per pod instead, from $3/mo, with traffic not metered. The difference matters less on a quiet month and a lot on the month you get traffic.
Where paas shows up on InstaPods
Related terms
Try it on a real server
InstaPods gives you a pod with SSH access, automatic HTTPS and persistent disk from $3/mo. One command from your project folder.
Deploy your first pod