A Cloud 66 alternative that stays out of your way
Cloud 66 deserves real credit here: it proved the bring-your-own-server control plane model years before it was a trend — connect a server you own, get a Heroku-like workflow on top of it, keep the infrastructure bill separate from the platform bill. The friction that actually pushes teams to look elsewhere isn’t the idea. It’s what a decade of adding features to that idea has made the product weigh, and what it now costs.
What’s actually different
The interface carries features most small teams never touch, accumulated over a long product lifetime — which is a normal thing to happen to any mature product, not a criticism of the engineering. The pricing reflects that same maturity: it starts well above what a solo developer or small team budget usually has room for. And it’s a closed product in the specific sense that matters here — you configure it, you don’t run it; there’s no path to looking at what it’s actually doing underneath.
Railyard is a deliberately smaller bet on the same core idea: connect a server, push code, get the actual day-two essentials — zero-downtime deploys, managed databases with failover, backups, autoscaling — at a price that doesn’t climb with headcount.
What comes across
- Your repo, built from a Dockerfile, buildpacks, or read straight from a Procfile — whichever already works today.
- Environment variables and secrets, as-is.
- Cloud 66’s ActiveDeploy-style zero-downtime releases carry over directly as Railyard’s own verify-then-swap cutover — same guarantee, different name.
- Managed Postgres, MySQL and Redis map onto Railyard’s managed addons.
- The servers themselves: attach what you already run over SSH rather than provisioning a new fleet from scratch.
The move, concretely
- Attach a server — one you already run under Cloud 66, or a fresh one Railyard provisions directly in your own cloud account.
- Add the repo and pick whichever build method matches how Cloud 66 already builds it.
- Bring the config over and attach the datastores the app expects.
- Deploy to a temporary URL, run the release task, actually verify it.
- Migrate the data with a dump and restore into the managed addon.
- Move DNS. The Cloud 66 stack keeps serving through the whole process — there’s no outage window to schedule. Decommission it only after the cutover is confirmed.
What’s actually different afterward
Less surface area, less cost, and a workflow that fits in your head: one dashboard, one clear action per screen, and nothing on the bill you’re not actually using. That’s the entire pitch — not more features than Cloud 66, fewer of the ones a small team never asked for.
Full platform comparison: Railyard vs. Cloud 66, and the complete migration walkthrough at Migrating from Cloud 66.