Going Live: Self-Hosting or Medusa Cloud?

With the launch of Medusa Cloud, a new question might arise when you need to decide on hosting options: should you self-host or use Medusa Cloud?

It is essential to understand the differences between both options to avoid costly consequences: high infrastructure expenses, longer time-to-market, and wasted resources spent managing deployments instead of shipping new features.

What is Self-Hosting

Self-hosting means deploying and managing your Medusa application on your own infrastructure or a hosting provider of your choice, such as AWS, Railway, or DigitalOcean.

Developers with infrastructure management experience may consider self-hosting their Medusa application to have more control over their deployment environment and potentially reduce costs.

However, because self-hosting is complex, it requires extensive experience in infrastructure management and dedicated time and resources. Otherwise, you may face high costs, poor performance, and slow developer experience, among other issues.

What is Medusa Cloud

Medusa Cloud is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering that manages your Medusa application's infrastructure with zero configuration. It offers features like GitHub integration, preview environment, auto-scaling, and dedicated support, all at a competitive cost.

Because Medusa Cloud is optimized specifically for Medusa projects, you spend less time on configuring infrastructure, and more time on shipping new features.

Self-Hosting vs Medusa Cloud

If you are deciding which hosting option is right for you, the diagram below highlights some of the key differences to keep in mind.

Hosting Costs

One of the most common reasons teams choose self-hosting is that they consider it a cheaper option with low-cost providers. However, as your business grows, you will need to scale usage and server capacity, which rapidly increases costs.

Medusa Cloud, on the other hand, is optimized for Medusa applications with features that support your business's growth. This allows us to operate more efficiently than generalized providers, giving you competitive and transparent pricing.

Time & Resource Efficiency

Self-hosting requires significant time and resources dedicated to configuration, patching, monitoring, and incident response. When you choose to self-host, you spend your efforts managing infrastructure rather than shipping features.

Medusa Cloud handles infrastructure management for you, with additional features like push-to-deploy workflows, automated backups, preview environments, and built-in support. These features elevate your developer experience and optimize your time to launch and ship.

When Should You Choose to Self-Host?

There are also valid reasons to choose self-hosting. The most common is when regulatory, compliance, or contractual requirements mandate control over infrastructure or specific hosting regions. Additionally, larger teams with established DevOps practices may find self-hosting aligns better with their existing workflows.

If you fall into one of these categories, self-hosting may be the right option. Otherwise, a managed service like Medusa Cloud provides the right balance of flexibility, performance, and reduced operational overhead, while still giving you control over your application.

Deeper Comparison

For a deeper comparison between the two approaches, check out our documentation. It goes over each of the key differences, highlights the challenges of each option, and helps you determine whether Medusa Cloud is the right choice for your store.