The five places code can live

Almost every hosting product on earth is a variation of one of these five categories. Learn these and the marketing pages stop being confusing.

• Static hosting — Plain files (HTML (HyperText Markup Language, the page structure), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets, the styling), JavaScript, images) served straight to the browser. No server "runs" your code; it just hands over files. Think of it as a folder on the internet. Because there's nothing to crash and nothing to patch, this is the most reliable thing you can put online. Examples: GitHub Pages, Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, Vercel (static mode).
• Edge functions — Tiny snippets of code that run on servers physically close to your user, all over the world. They start almost instantly and are great for lightweight logic: auth checks, redirects, small API (Application Programming Interface — the doorway one program uses to talk to another) calls. The catch: they run in a stripped-down environment, so not every library works there. Examples: Cloudflare Workers, Vercel Edge Functions, Deno Deploy.
• Serverless functions — Code that runs on demand and disappears when idle. You're billed per request, not per hour. You write a function; the platform handles the machines. Great until a single request needs to run for minutes — most platforms cut a function off after a timeout (often 10–60 seconds). Examples: AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Vercel Functions.
• Containers — Your app plus its entire environment (the right language version, libraries, system tools) packaged into a portable box called a container. The platform keeps that box running. More control, slightly more setup. The one file that defines the box is a Dockerfile, and AI writes those well. Examples: Fly.io, Railway, Render, Google Cloud Run.
• Virtual machines (VMs) — A whole computer you rent in a data center. You install and manage everything yourself — the operating system, security updates, the web server, all of it. Maximum control, maximum responsibility. Examples: AWS EC2, DigitalOcean Droplets, Hetzner.

Side by side, the five categories trade less to manage for more control as you go down:

        YOU MANAGE LESS  ◀────────────────────────────▶  YOU MANAGE MORE
        cheaper when idle                                more control

  ┌──────────┐  ┌──────────┐  ┌────────────┐  ┌───────────┐  ┌──────────┐
  │  STATIC  │  │   EDGE   │  │ SERVERLESS │  │ CONTAINER │  │    VM    │
  │  files   │  │ function │  │  function  │  │  your box │  │ whole PC │
  ├──────────┤  ├──────────┤  ├────────────┤  ├───────────┤  ├──────────┤
  │ no code  │  │ runs at  │  │ runs on    │  │ stays     │  │ you run  │
  │ runs     │  │ the edge │  │ demand     │  │ running   │  │ it ALL   │
  └──────────┘  └──────────┘  └────────────┘  └───────────┘  └──────────┘
   Pages         Workers       Lambda          Railway        EC2

A rough rule of thumb for cost: the more the platform manages for you, the cheaper it is when nobody's using your app, and the more it does the worrying when everybody is.