Laravel Hosting: Best Platforms for Deploying Laravel Apps

Laravel currently powers over 1.5 million websites globally, and the ecosystem is growing faster than ever. Because of this massive growth, finding the best Laravel hosting has become a top priority for development teams, agencies, and enterprise architects. 

This article compares several leading Laravel hosting solutions, including their strengths, pricing models, and suitability for different development workflows. 

Common Challenges with Hosting Laravel Apps

When choosing how to host a Laravel application, developers may need to consider the following challenges:

1. The DevOps Burden of Unmanaged Servers: It takes a frustrating amount of time and effort to manage servers manually. Configuring NGINX, securing firewalls with iptables, manually renewing Let’s Encrypt certificates, and troubleshooting PHP-FPM bottlenecks require significant effort.
2. Vendor Lock-in: Some managed and serverless platforms encourage the use of provider-specific databases, caching services, storage systems, or deployment configurations. The more closely an application depends on these services, the more work may be required to migrate it elsewhere. 
3. Cost Predictability at Scale: Usage-based pricing can make monthly costs harder to predict, particularly during sustained traffic increases or unexpected spikes. In some cases, this can cost more than a flat-rate compute instance. 
4. Architectural Isolation: Some server configurations make it difficult to run applications that require conflicting PHP versions or supporting services. Without suitable isolation, these differences can cause dependency conflicts. 

Top Laravel Hosting Platforms

The platforms below take different approaches to server management, application isolation, pricing, and scalability. The best Laravel hosting option will depend on your technical requirements and preferred level of infrastructure control.

Laravel Forge

Laravel Forge is a developer-focused server management tool and has been the go-to choice in the PHP community since 2014. It is created by the team behind the Laravel framework itself and is designed to provision and manage VPS instances across popular cloud providers such as DigitalOcean, AWS, and Hetzner. 

The greatest strength of Forge is its deep, native understanding of the modern PHP ecosystem. It provides first-class support for managing background queue workers via Supervisor, handling scheduled cron tasks, and deploying database clusters straight from a clean, minimalist dashboard. If you work primarily within the Laravel ecosystem, Forge provides a closely integrated way to provision servers and deploy applications. 

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While Forge is incredibly powerful, it traditionally installs your software stack natively onto the server’s operating system. This approach is highly efficient but may occasionally require extra care when running multiple applications on the same server that require conflicting versions of secondary services. For teams that prefer a deployment service created by the Laravel team, Forge remains a strong option. 

Cost: Forge uses a SaaS model. The Hobby plan starts at $12 per month for managing a single server. As your needs grow, you can upgrade to the Growth plan at $19 per month for unlimited servers, or the Business plan at $39 per month to unlock advanced deployment workflows and priority support. You simply pay this flat management fee alongside your separate raw cloud server costs.

Laravel Cloud & Laravel Vapor

If you want to eliminate server management, you can use one of two first-party cloud solutions: Laravel Vapor and the newly launched Laravel Cloud. Laravel Vapor is a serverless deployment platform powered by AWS, while Laravel Cloud is a managed application platform built specifically for Laravel. Both reduce the amount of infrastructure that developers must manage directly. 

Laravel Vapor deploys applications to AWS Lambda and can automatically scale application capacity in response to changing traffic. This makes it suitable for applications with variable or unpredictable workloads. Laravel Cloud supports hibernation for compatible compute resources. These resources can scale to zero while idle and resume in under 500 milliseconds when traffic returns, reducing compute charges during inactive periods. 

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These platforms suit developers who want to reduce the amount of infrastructure they manage directly. Laravel Cloud automatically injects your environment variables, handles dedicated worker clusters for queue processing, and offers native support for managed databases. You can connect your repository and deploy your code while the platform manages much of the underlying routing and infrastructure. Scaling behavior and resource allocation can then be configured for the application. 

Cost: These platforms rely on usage-based billing. Vapor offers a free Sandbox tier, while its paid plans and any underlying AWS resources incur separate charges. Laravel Cloud’s Starter plan costs $5 per month and includes $5 in monthly usage credits. Further charges depend on the resources used. This pricing can suit small or variable workloads, although costs may be harder to forecast than those of a fixed-price server. 

Cloudways

Cloudways provides a good balance between traditional shared hosting and complex cloud infrastructure by offering a fully managed experience. Instead of buying a server from DigitalOcean and connecting it to a separate control panel, Cloudways bundles the server and the management interface into a single, unified monthly bill.

Cloudways includes caching, SSL management, backups, and several server security features. Other services, including CDN and malware-protection products, may be available as paid add-ons. Their platform is incredibly user-friendly, allowing you to launch applications, configure SSL certificates, and manage automated backups with just a few clicks.

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The primary trade-off with Cloudways is its pricing structure at scale. Because they bundle the service, you pay a markup on the underlying server cost. While this is fantastic for one or two small servers, if you are running a digital agency that manages dozens of large servers, you may find that these markup fees become quite expensive compared to purchasing unmanaged servers directly. 

Cost: Cloudways is highly attractive for single-server setups. Cloudways currently advertises DigitalOcean-based managed hosting plans starting at $11 per month, which include server resources and Cloudways’ management platform. Cloudways also provides 24/7 support, which may appeal to business owners who do not want to manage servers without assistance.

Ploi

Ploi is a SaaS server management panel designed for developers and agencies. Ploi connects to your VPS and offers an easy-to-navigate, functional interface. It also provides several unique features that anticipate the needs of modern web agencies.

For example, it includes out-of-the-box support for load balancing, status pages, and staging-to-production deployment workflows. Furthermore, its seamless one-click installations across platforms such as WordPress, Statamic, and Nextcloud make it incredibly versatile for agencies managing mixed technology stacks.

Ploi also offers a Team Management feature to help you collaborate with team members. You can create a team and maintain full control over who has access to what. It provides granular, role-based permissions that you can configure per user, per server, and per site. This makes it possible to grant a team member specific access, such as database-only rights, without compromising other areas. 

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It successfully takes complex infrastructure tasks, such as setting up load balancers or configuring database backups with external providers, and simplifies them into intuitive processes. 

Cost: Ploi offers a free plan for one server. Its paid Basic plan costs €8 or $10 per month for up to 5 servers, while higher plans increase the server allowance and add more features. 

Upsun

Upsun is a modern, multi-cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that offers deep, native integrations specifically tailored for Laravel development. Unlike traditional VPS management tools, Upsun manages the underlying infrastructure entirely across AWS, Azure, and GCP, while allowing you to define managed services (such as PostgreSQL, Redis, or RabbitMQ) directly in your configuration files.

A notable Upsun feature is its support for preview environments. When you create a new Git branch, Upsun can automatically spin up an isolated preview environment that inherits live data, services, and routing from your production setup. This allows your team to test bug fixes and new features in a highly realistic, production-like setting before ever pushing to the live app.

Upsun also includes built-in integrations for Blackfire.io to profile your database queries and queue jobs, along with environment-specific toggles for Laravel Telescope. It even supports dedicated worker containers for Laravel Horizon, ensuring your background queues never compete with your web traffic for resources.

Cost: Because Upsun uses resource-based, per-second pricing, the final cost depends on the resources and services used. Its pricing calculator can provide an estimate, though the monthly total may vary based on the precise CPU, RAM, and storage your application consumes, alongside variable and fixed components such as user licenses (€10.00/user/month), project fees (€9.00/project/month), storage (€0.49/GB/month), backups (€0.10/GB/month), and request volume (€1.00/100,000 requests). 

RunCloud

RunCloud (that’s us!) is a server management platform for teams who want to use their own cloud servers and manage them through a graphical interface. It can connect to compatible Ubuntu servers from a wide range of cloud providers.

What sets RunCloud apart is its innovative use of Docker-containerized servers. If you use the Dockerized server stack on RunCloud, you can isolate different web applications on your server. 

This isolation can prevent dependency conflicts between applications and reduce the impact of an application-level problem on other containers. It also allows different applications to use different supported PHP versions on the same server. Container isolation does not remove the need to secure and update the host server and each application.

RunCloud also offers Git with atomic deployment functionality. This minimizes application downtime during updates by preparing your new release in an isolated directory before updating the active web root symlink. To coordinate this process across your organization, you can use RunCloud’s teams and workspaces features to partition your projects and manage access permissions for your team members.

You can also use the RunCloud API to configure applications, trigger deployments, and automate recurring server-management tasks. For high-performance setups, follow our guide to set up Laravel Octane on RunCloud servers.

Cost: RunCloud uses flat-rate subscription plans, with cloud-server charges paid separately. The Essentials plan costs $9 per month for one server. The Professional plan costs $19 per month and supports up to 50 servers, while the Business plan costs $49 per month and supports up to 100 servers. Business also includes features such as atomic deployment, team management, a Web Application Firewall, and API access. 

Total Cost of Ownership for Hosting Laravel Apps

The relative cost of a PaaS, serverless platform, or server management panel depends on the application’s traffic, resource requirements, staffing needs, and operational model. A control panel may offer predictable management fees, while a PaaS can reduce the time spent on infrastructure maintenance.

Direct cost comparisons between these platforms are difficult because they include different services and use different billing models. RunCloud and Forge charge a management subscription in addition to the cost of your servers. Cloudways combines managed hosting and server resources into a single price. Laravel Cloud and Upsun charge according to the resources and services used. 

Final Thoughts

In this post, we have discussed several tools for managing and hosting your Laravel applications. Forge offers close ties to the Laravel ecosystem; Laravel Cloud and Vapor reduce the need for direct infrastructure management; Cloudways bundles hosting and management; Ploi provides agency-focused server tools; and Upsun offers a managed multi-cloud platform. RunCloud suits teams that want to retain control of their cloud servers while managing them through a central panel. 

RunCloud offers a 7-day free trial for developers and teams who want to test its server management, deployment, and application isolation features.

Start using RunCloud Today.