Deploy your first service

The deployment wizard creates a service from a Docker image.

Method

Here you can choose with which method you want to deploy your new service. Currently we only support the Web UI Method, but we are hard at work to get the MCP based deployment up and running asap!

Subdomain

Choose the free Hostly subdomain for the service. This is the address users will open after the deployment is running.

Keep SSL enabled unless you have a specific reason to test without HTTPS. High availability will increase resource usage, so we recommend you only enable this when you need the extra availability.

Image

Enter the full Docker image URL. Public images can be checked directly. For private registries, add registry credentials when Hostly asks for them.

When you want to use an image from dockerhub, e.g. https://hub.docker.com/r/neosmemo/memos you need to remove the first portion of the link. So it then becomes: neosmemo/memos:<version>

Examples of valid docker urls:

nginx:latest
ghcr.io/example/my-service:1.0.0
registry.example.com/team/app:2026-07-21

Port

Hostly needs to know which port your application listens on inside the container

For example, if your app starts a web server on 3000, enter 3000. Hostly will take care of wiring the public ports for HTTPS/HTTP Traffic to this port. We are also working on extending the available protocols.

TIP

Need extra ports? Let us know!

Configuration

Use configuration only when your image needs it.

• Environment variables are plain KEY=VALUE settings.
• Secrets store sensitive values and can be referenced from environment variables.
• Files upload configuration files and mount them at a path inside the container.
• Volumes add persistent storage. Only available on paid tier

Environment & Secrets

Example environment variables:

NODE_ENV=production
PORT=3000
DATABASE_URL=my-database.example.com
DATABASE_PASSWORD=${POSTGRES_PW}

In the example the shown variable DATABASE_PASSWORD is referenced from a secret stored in Hostly. When your image is deployed, Hostly will retrieve the secret value from it's encrypted vault, and inject the value into the environment variable DATABASE_PASSWORD as specified.

Files

Some applications require config files to run properly, or maybe you want to supply some other files to your application that are not contained in the docker image.

Click on "Add" and select the files you want to provide. Note: Files can only be 1MB max!. After uploading you can then define the path, where the file should be available inside of your docker image, e.g.: /app/config.yaml

Volumes (Paid tier only)

Some applications need to store files and other data on disk, and need this to be available after a restart. To enable this we support adding volumes to your service.

By clicking "Add" a new volume specification will be created. You can then define the path where it should be available in the docker image, as well as the desired size. The size has to be a minimum of 1 GB.

Volumes are billed per GiB per Day, so 1 Gib for a Day = 1 Gib/d in your usage.

Behaviour on stopping/pausing

When you pause a service, the persistent volume will remain for a later point in time. You will be billed for this duration. When a service is stopped all remnants of the service including the volume are removed, and your data is lost.