Prototype on the free slice, rent the box before real data arrives

Saturday: the free container is a real Linux machine with every service live. You build the prototype, share the URL, get three people to try it.

Tuesday: one of them wants to upload their client list. Stop. The free server is a capped slice of a shared physical host. The kernel is shared with strangers, disk blocks deduplicate host-wide, and the cross-tenant side-channel class is not ruled out. The docs say it plainly: untrusted for customer data, secrets, regulated anything.

You rent a $29 bare metal box. Now the hardware is yours alone, the proxy runs on it, and Hoody's API is out of the traffic path. Snapshot the prototype, copy it over, repoint the alias. Twenty minutes.

The free tier is for finding out whether the idea works; the rented box is for the first customer who trusts you.