A commenter recommended DigitalOcean for a cheap VPS to host a Node.js application, ensuring a startup has full control over bot filtering without interference from the hosting provider.

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    "summary": "A commenter recommended DigitalOcean for a cheap VPS to host a Node.js application, ensuring a startup has full control over bot filtering without interference from the hosting provider.",
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        "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/webhosting/comments/1wty5av/comment/pd98j8o/",
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        "score": 2,
        "author": "themageofavalon",
        "excerpt": "A VPS probably makes the most sense here. InMotion could be worth a look too, they've been reliable for me so far.",
        "posted_at": "2026-10-01T18:20:07.000Z",
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        "author": "enby_dot_local",
        "excerpt": "Cloudflare workers should be able to do this.",
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        "author": "Jassi_Punjaban",
        "excerpt": "I would get a VPS, and then put all the domains behind Cloudflare. Also install a WAF and would have all under my control.",
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        "author": "Cool_Chemistry_3119",
        "excerpt": "I would go for railway personally",
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        "author": "Environmental-Try-78",
        "excerpt": "for a small node or nextjs setup where u need total control over bot filtering a cheap VPS on hetzner or digitalocean running docker with coolify or dokku is 100% the way to go. zero platform level bot blocking so cloudflare handles all ur WAF rules without hosting providers silently dropping requests before they reach ur app\n\n if u want more hosting setups or japanese learning guides drop by my p",
        "posted_at": "2026-09-30T10:07:13.000Z",
        "author_url": "https://www.reddit.com/user/Environmental-Try-78/"
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        "author": "HeiiHallo",
        "excerpt": "a plain vps with something like haloy works great for this.",
        "posted_at": "2026-09-30T10:36:36.000Z",
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        "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/webhosting/comments/1wty5av/comment/pde1isk/",
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        "author": "UltaHost_",
        "excerpt": "u/Briney_coder's argument about the logs is the correct one, and should be done first, in many such cases.cloudflare is the one doing the blocking, not the host.\n\n There are two settings in Cloudflare that accomplish this:\n\n Security > Bots: the \"Block AI bots\" / \"AI Crawl Control\" feature, which operates at the zone level and can enforce crawl blocking alongside robots.txt\n\n Bot Fight Mode: this",
        "posted_at": "2026-10-02T11:09:14.000Z",
        "author_url": "https://www.reddit.com/user/UltaHost_/"
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        "author": "Cubepath",
        "excerpt": "I’d go with a plain VPS behind Cloudflare for this. You keep control over Node and the firewall, and avoid another platform layer potentially filtering crawlers.\n\n At CubePath we see setups like this quite often. For a small Node app, a basic VPS + Cloudflare + Coolify/GitHub is probably all you need.",
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    "post_text": "I'm running a couple of small Node apps (Next.js plus a lightweight JSON service) behind Cloudflare, and making them readable by AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and the like) is a core requirement for me, not a nice-to-have.\n\nI've found that shared and managed hosting platforms increasingly apply their own bot filtering at the server level. It's often invisible in their dashboards and not configurable per site, so a crawler you explicitly allow in robots.txt can still be turned away before it reaches your app. I'm re-evaluating where I host because of it.\n\nCurrently struggling a lot with my current provider and it's also quite annoying that you allow bots in the panel and then find out their requests got blocked when you look into logs.\n\nWhat I'm looking for:\n\n- a long-running Node 24 process\n\n- Easy deployment, preferably from GitHub but I can handle a complex CI/CD as well\n\n- no platform-level bot filtering I can't control (Cloudflare handles that for me)\n\n- a sensible price for a startup with currently low to medium traffic.\n\nI'm weighing managed container platforms (Railway, Render, Fly.io), a plain VPS behind Cloudflare, and Vercel / Cloudflare's own compute, even thinking about AWS, Azure or Google.\n\nCurious what others are using for similar setups, and whether you've actually verified that AI crawlers get through, e.g. in your server logs or Cloudflare's...",
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