48 Hours to Get Out: We Ran Live Fire Drills Off Four Free Tiers and Lived to Tell About It

Free tiers are great until they aren't. The traffic spike happens, the credit card requirement kicks in, or the plan quietly sunsets — and suddenly you've got two days to move a project you built over eight months.

We wanted to know what that actually feels like. So we did it on purpose. We took four identical apps, deployed them on four well-known free hosting tiers, pushed each one until it hit a limit or an expiration notice, and gave ourselves 48 hours to get everything off the platform and onto a new home. Here's the play-by-play, and more importantly, the escape plan you should write before you need it.

The Rules of the Drill

Every migration had to meet the same bar: full database export, file or container migration, DNS cutover with under an hour of downtime, and zero data loss. No paying for the old plan to "buy time." That's the scenario most developers actually face — you're out of runway and the meter's running.

Host #1: The Container Platform That Made It Almost Boring

The first host, a popular container-based free tier, was the closest to painless. Environment variables exported via CLI in one command. The container image itself pulled down and re-pushed to the new provider in under 20 minutes.

The surprise? Cron jobs and scheduled workers didn't come with us. They lived in the platform's scheduler, not in our repo, and there was no export for them. We had to reconstruct three jobs from memory and logs. Lesson: if it's configured in a dashboard and not in code, it's not backed up. Write your infrastructure down or, better, as code.

Host #2: The Managed Database With a Locked Door

This one stung. The free Postgres tier offered a web-based query console and daily backups you could view but not download in bulk. pg_dump over an external connection was throttled to a crawl — our 2 GB database was projected to take 14+ hours.

We got creative: chunked exports by table through the console, compressed on our side, and stitched the dumps back together. Total time: about 9 hours of the 48. It worked, but it shouldn't have been that hard. If your free database provider doesn't offer a real connection string with dump access, treat that as a dealbreaker from day one.

Host #3: The Static Host That Was Gone Before We Started

One tier had already changed its terms between when we deployed and when we ran the drill — the free plan now required a paid upgrade to keep custom domains. The actual file migration took 15 minutes. The DNS cutover, thanks to a 24-hour TTL someone set a year ago, took most of a day to fully propagate.

Fix this today: drop your DNS TTLs to 300 seconds. It costs you nothing and turns a day-long cutover into a five-minute one.

Host #4: The One That Held Our Project Hostage

The worst performer offered no bulk export at all. Media uploads could only be downloaded through the web dashboard, a few files at a time. Our 1,200-image media library would have taken a full workday of clicking.

We scripted a scraper against their own CDN URLs instead — technically doable, explicitly gray-area in their ToS. We got the data, but we shouldn't have had to. A host that won't let you export your own uploads in bulk is a host that's betting you'll pay rather than leave. Don't build there.

Your Pre-Written Escape Plan

Based on four runs, here's the checklist we now keep in every project repo:

• Dumps on a schedule. pg_dump/mysqldump cron job pushing to S3 or Backblaze, outside the host. Weekly minimum.
• Everything in code. Env vars, cron schedules, build settings — documented or scripted, never dashboard-only.
• TTL at 300. Set it now, thank yourself later.
• A rehearsed target. Know where you'd go — a paid tier of a competitor, a $5 VPS — and have an account ready.
• Media mirrored. If your host stores uploads, sync them out regularly.

The Verdict

Two of our four hosts made leaving genuinely reasonable. One made it slow. One made it hostile. The difference wasn't price — it was whether the provider sees your data as yours or as leverage.

Free hosting is a legitimately great deal for hobby projects and portfolios. But the deal only works if you treat every free tier as a rental, not a home. Run your own fire drill this weekend. It takes an hour, and it's the cheapest insurance your side project will ever get.