HostStack vs sota.io: Same Cloud, Different Bill — Comparing Two Hetzner-Native EU PaaS Platforms

Most of the comparisons in this series turn on a jurisdiction gap: a platform hosts in the EU but is legally a US company (Railway, Render, Out Plane), or somewhere with no EU adequacy relationship at all (InstaPods). HostStack doesn't give us that story. It's a genuinely EU-native git-push PaaS, built on the same underlying cloud provider sota.io uses — Hetzner. When two platforms share the same physical infrastructure and the same legal region, the interesting question isn't "who controls your data" but "how does the bill actually work, and what's really live today."

What HostStack is

HostStack describes itself as "a modern Platform-as-a-Service for deploying web services, databases, and cron jobs on European (Hetzner) infrastructure." The deployment model is git-push: a repository gets built into a Docker container and rolled out with zero-downtime blue/green deploys. Beyond the standard web-service/worker/cron-job trio, it offers a genuinely wide managed-database menu — PostgreSQL (single-node or a 3-node Patroni high-availability setup), MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, Redis, NATS, and Meilisearch, per HostStack's own pricing documentation. sota.io, by comparison, ships managed PostgreSQL only.

The entity: Denmark, not a jurisdiction gap

HostStack's Trust Center and Terms name the operating company directly: MICCI, a Danish company, registration number 45587452, registered at Fyrretoften 31, 7100 Vejle, Denmark. Section 10 of the Terms is explicit: "These Terms are governed by the laws of Denmark, excluding its conflict-of-laws rules. Disputes shall be submitted to the exclusive jurisdiction of Retten i Kolding" — the Danish district court covering Vejle.

Denmark is an EU member state, which means this isn't the Out Plane or InstaPods pattern. There's no US LLC hiding behind an EU-flag homepage and no non-adequate third country in the ownership chain. On the jurisdiction question specifically, HostStack and sota.io land in the same place: both are EU-incorporated companies, both fall under GDPR directly as EU entities, and neither is reachable via the US CLOUD Act. That's parity, not an edge for either side — the same conclusion we reached comparing sota.io against Coolify, Zerops, and Apply.Build.

On certifications, HostStack's Trust Center states it is "Pursuing ISO 27001 certification" and can share current controls documentation with enterprise customers on request; SOC 2 isn't mentioned anywhere on that page. sota.io doesn't hold ISO 27001 or SOC 2 either. Neither company has finished the audit process — worth knowing if a certificate is a hard requirement for your procurement checklist, but not a reason to pick one platform over the other today.

Regions: one is live, three are "coming soon"

This is the part that's easy to miss on the marketing page. HostStack's own regions documentation lists four regions total, but only one is actually running:

The docs are direct about this: "New projects deploy to eu-central-1 (Helsinki, Finland) — currently our only live region and the default." Worth noting in HostStack's favor: its own documentation flags the planned Ashburn region as not GDPR-resident and advises EU customers to stay on EU regions — an honest disclosure rather than a marketing gloss, the same kind of transparency we called out favorably in Out Plane's public data-center list. But if your evaluation criteria includes "multiple EU regions available today," HostStack currently has exactly one. sota.io runs on Hetzner Cloud in the EU without a published city-level region choice; the comparison here isn't about who has more regions, it's that HostStack's own roadmap for additional EU regions (Nuremberg, Falkenstein) is not yet delivered.

Pricing: seven service tiers, four database tiers, three meters

sota.io's pricing model is a single flat plan per tier (Developer / Team / Enterprise), with pricing published at general availability. HostStack works the opposite way: a menu of fixed-size tiers plus usage-based add-ons, all billed in EUR with no monthly plan fee layered on top. Per HostStack's pricing page:

Web services / workers / cron jobs / static sites:

Managed databases (Postgres/MySQL/MariaDB/MongoDB/Redis):

On top of the tier price: storage beyond the included allowance is €0.10/GB-month, bandwidth is €0.01/GB after the first 200 GB per team per month, and build minutes are €0.005/min after the first 500 minutes per team per month.

Line up HostStack's tiers against the 2 vCPU / 2 GB benchmark spec we use across this series, and there's no exact match. Standard (2 GB RAM, 1 vCPU) gets the RAM but only half the CPU, at €20/mo. Large (4 GB RAM, 2 vCPU) gets the CPU but double the RAM, at €40/mo. Add a Standard database (1 GB RAM, 20 GB storage) at €15/mo, and the closer-CPU-match illustrative total lands at €55/mo for a workload that would run flat on a single sota.io plan once GA pricing is published. That's not a criticism of the model — fine-grained tiers genuinely let you pay less for genuinely smaller workloads — but it does mean the advertised entry price (€1/mo Pico) and the price for a real production-sized service are very different numbers, and working out which tier you actually need takes some reading.

The free tier is real, and it's live today

Here's a point that cuts the other way. HostStack states plainly: "One Nano service + one Starter Postgres are always free." That's a self-serve, no-waitlist, always-on free tier you can use right now. sota.io, per its own pricing page, is currently invite-only: Developer and Team plans are marked "available at GA" and sit behind a waitlist; only Enterprise — "dedicated capacity on EU infrastructure... migration support from US clouds" — is open for business today, via a direct inquiry. If the test is "can I sign up and deploy a small side project in the next ten minutes without talking to anyone," HostStack passes that test today and sota.io's self-serve tiers don't yet.

To be fair to HostStack

Beyond the free tier, HostStack's database menu is genuinely broader than sota.io's: seven engines including MongoDB and Meilisearch, plus an optional 3-node Patroni high-availability configuration for Postgres that sota.io doesn't offer at all. The tiered-plus-metered pricing model rewards workloads that are actually tiny — a Pico web service at €1/mo undercuts anything sota.io is likely to price at GA for a hobby project. And running on the exact same underlying cloud (Hetzner) as sota.io means HostStack inherits the same physical reliability and EU-locality characteristics that make Hetzner attractive to EU-native PaaS builders in the first place — this isn't a "which company actually controls a distant data center" question the way it is with several other platforms in this series.

Side-by-side

The actual trade-off

If you want a wide managed-database menu, an actual free tier you can use today without an invite, and you're comfortable reading a tier table to find the right size for your workload, HostStack is a real, EU-native, Hetzner-backed option worth trying now. If you want one flat price with Postgres included and you're fine waiting for sota.io's Developer/Team tiers to open at GA, the trade is the other way. What this comparison doesn't give you — unlike most others in this series — is a jurisdiction reason to pick one over the other. Both are EU companies running on EU infrastructure; the decision here is genuinely about pricing structure, database breadth, and how many of HostStack's regions are actually live versus roadmapped.

See also: Zerops vs sota.io: one flat price vs. four meters · Out Plane vs sota.io: EU data centers, Delaware LLC · Apply.Build vs sota.io: EU-native security vs. database