The day you rent the box is the day the answer changes

You built the whole product on the free tier. Real container, real URLs, real snapshots. Then the first enterprise prospect sends the questionnaire: Is your infrastructure shared with other tenants?

On the free tier the honest answer is yes. A free server is a capped slice of a physical host that also carries strangers' slices. One kernel shared with people you cannot audit, one CPU cache, disk blocks deduplicated host-wide. Every other layer of the security stack still applies; that one doesn't.

You rent a server for $29 a month and copy your containers onto it. Same URL shape, same snapshots, same code. Now the machine is allocated to you alone: no shared hypervisor, no neighbour on the DIMMs.

You answer the questionnaire with one word. A free slice is a machine you share; a rented one is a machine you own.