What it is

HostStack is a platform-as-a-service for teams who want Render-class developer experience without the US-cloud arithmetic. Git-driven deploys, managed databases on the same internal network as your service, blue/green rollouts, custom domains, TLS via Let's Encrypt + Traefik, log streaming, metrics, autoscaling. Everything runs in Hetzner regions inside the EU; the bill arrives in euros from a Danish company.

Why it exists

Before HostStack I ran every side project on a single Hetzner box I'd been quietly maintaining for six years. It worked, but every new project meant SSH-ing in, adding another systemd unit, hand-rolling a Caddy block, and hoping the next deploy didn't take the previous service down.

Moving to Render kept failing the same arithmetic — the DX was right there, but so was the bill in dollars, the data in us-east-1, and a privacy policy that referenced the CLOUD Act in the small print. I'd run a Danish company on a Danish server for six years specifically to avoid that conversation.

So I built HostStack. Same git-push experience, European infrastructure, the bits I cared about.

What you get

Git-driven deploys. Push to main, build, blue/green rollout. Zero-downtime by default. WebSocket-streamed build logs because nobody enjoys polling.
Managed Postgres, Redis, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, Meilisearch, NATS. One click to spin up next to a service. Backups, version upgrades, connection pooling — handled.
Real domain + TLS. Bind a domain, get a cert, redirect www, get HSTS, move on.
An MCP server. Deploy, debug, and inspect from inside Claude Code. The AI pair-programmer is a first-class consumer of the control plane — get_deploy_logs, list_env_vars, get_service_metrics, diagnose_deploy are all callable from a chat window.
Activity log + audit trail. Every change is attributable. Every alert resolvable.

What it isn't

No global edge. EU regions only. If you need POPs in Singapore, this isn't the right platform yet.
No managed Kubernetes. The orchestration layer is invisible. That's the product, not a missing feature.
A small team. That's a feature too — you can email the engineer who can actually fix your problem.

Dogfooding

Three things run in production on HostStack right now and all of them are mine: PostStack, this site, and Skyskraber. Every paper cut I hit running my own services gets fixed before it ships to anyone else.

Where to read more

The long version — including the hoststack.dev/blog reading list on European alternatives, GDPR-compliant hosting, and digital sovereignty — is the blog post Why every micci project deploys to hoststack.