Railway is genuinely fine for a database up to a few hundred gigabytes, but the defaults are built for demos. Treat the template as a starting point.

Does Railway’s Postgres Survive a Restart?

Yes, with a caveat. Railway stores the Postgres volume persistently, so data survives a service restart or redeploy. The volume belongs to the service — deleting the Postgres service deletes the data, and there is no undo window.

What does not exist out of the box is point-in-time recovery or an automated off-site backup. On the Pro plan you can enable scheduled volume backups. On Hobby, you write your own dump.

How Do I Connect Services Without Exposing the Database?

The one-click template exposes Postgres publicly by default because it generates a TCP proxy for external tools. If only your own services need access, delete that proxy.

Steps:

1. Open the Postgres service → Settings → Networking.
2. Remove the TCP Proxy entry.
3. Set your app’s DATABASE_URL to the internal hostname, which is the internal host postgres.railway.internal.
4. Confirm with psql "$DATABASE_URL" -c 'select 1' from a Railway shell.

Internal traffic between services in the same project does not leave Railway’s network and is not billed as egress. Leaving the TCP proxy on means an internet-reachable database on a long random port — not fatal, but unnecessary.

How Do I Schedule Backups on the Hobby Plan?

Pro has backups; Hobby does not. The workaround is a cron service in the same project.

pg_dump "$DATABASE_URL" | gzip | aws s3 cp - s3://your-bucket/db/$(date +%F).sql.gz

Run it as a service with cron schedule 0 3 * * * and restartPolicyType: NEVER. Set a bucket lifecycle rule to expire after 30 days. Test the restore once — an untested backup is a file, not a backup.

How Do I Add a Background Worker?

Railway treats a worker as just another service from the same repo with a different start command. There is no separate worker tier.

Share the same DATABASE_URL and REDIS_URL by adding the worker to the project; variables set on a shared group are inherited. Without a shared group you will paste connection strings twice and drift.

Why Does My Service Keep Restarting?

Crash loops on Railway usually trace to a memory limit. Hobby containers get a soft ceiling based on plan credits; when a Node process crosses roughly 512 MB of resident memory it gets OOM-killed, restarts, and repeats.

Add a health check path under Settings → Deploy → Healthcheck Path. Railway waits for a 200 before routing traffic, so a slow boot does not serve errors for 40 seconds. Also pin your Node version — an unpinned engines field can pull a major you never tested.

When Should You Not Use Railway for the Database?

If you need multi-region replication, connection pooling at the thousands-of-connections scale, or a compliance audit trail, use a dedicated provider. Railway’s managed Postgres is a convenience layer, not a DBA replacement. Teams that pick it for a regulated workload end up migrating within a quarter.

Quick Summary

• Railway Postgres persists across restarts but has no automated backup on the Hobby plan.
• Delete the TCP proxy and use PROJECT.railway.internal hostnames for private traffic.
• Schedule pg_dump to object storage with a NEVER-restart cron service.
• Workers are the same repo with a different start command and no public domain.
• OOM kills at roughly 512 MB are the most common crash-loop cause.

The pitch is Heroku without the sleep. Whether that holds up depends on your traffic shape, which is worth checking before you move a production app.

What Is Railway and How Does It Differ From Heroku?

Railway is a platform-as-a-service that builds from source and runs containers on shared or dedicated compute. You pay for CPU and memory per minute of actual use, plus a small per-service baseline.

Compared with Heroku, three differences matter. Railway has no sleeping dynos on paid plans, supports long-running workers without a separate add-on tier, and lets you provision Postgres, Redis, and MySQL as first-class services inside the same project rather than as add-ons billed separately.

How Do I Deploy a Repo to Railway Step by Step?

1. Sign in at railway.com with GitHub. The free trial credit is $5, once, and it expires after 30 days.
2. Click New Project → Deploy from GitHub repo. Grant repo access if it is your first time.
3. Pick the repo. Railway runs a Nixpacks build; watch the log pane, not the spinner.
4. Add environment variables under the service’s Variables tab. You can paste a .env block directly.
5. Click Generate Domain under Settings → Networking to get a public URL.

A Node app only needs npm start in package.json. If Railway cannot find a start command it picks node index.js, which fails silently on anything that expects dist/server.js.

Why Did My Build Fail?

Most Railway build failures come from three causes, in order of frequency.

That third one gets everyone once. Railway injects PORT at runtime; an app hardcoded to 3000 will build fine and serve 502s forever.

How Much Does Railway Actually Cost?

There is no free tier for always-on apps. The trial gives $5 of credit, and after that the Hobby plan starts at $5 per month, which includes $5 of usage. Compute is billed at roughly $0.000463 per vCPU-minute and $0.000231 per GB-minute at the time of writing.

A small Node API with one worker and a Postgres instance typically lands between $5 and $12 a month. Compare that with a $7 Hetzner VPS that handles ten times the traffic — Railway is convenience, not cheap compute. It wins when you would otherwise pay an engineer to run servers.

How Do I Add a Database and Custom Domain?

Right-click the project canvas → Database → Add PostgreSQL. Railway injects DATABASE_URL into every service in the project automatically, so your app picks it up with no config change.

For a custom domain: Settings → Networking → Custom Domain, then add the CNAME Railway shows you at your DNS provider. TLS is issued automatically and renews itself. Propagation is usually under ten minutes with Cloudflare proxy off — leave the orange cloud on and you will fight SSL errors for an hour.

Is Railway Right for You?

Good fit: side projects, staging environments, internal tools, and small APIs where $10 a month beats an afternoon of server setup. Bad fit: anything that needs to run for free indefinitely, GPU workloads, or apps with hard compliance requirements around data residency — Railway’s regions are limited.

Quick Summary

• Railway builds from a GitHub repo in about 10 minutes with no Dockerfile.
• The $5 trial credit is one-time; always-on apps cost at least $5/month.
• Listen on process.env.PORT or you get 502s.
• Postgres and Redis are one-click services that inject connection strings automatically.
• It is a convenience purchase — a $7 VPS is far cheaper if you can manage it.