September 10, 2026
Blazor hosting on a $6 VPS
The smallest DigitalOcean droplet — a few dollars a month — is genuinely enough to host a real Blazor app, WebAssembly or Server. The app isn’t the hard part. Everything around it is.
WebAssembly’s catch
A WASM app ships as a bundle of static files, and the compiled payload is large before it’s compressed. Serve it without the right compression and caching setup and a return visitor re-downloads megabytes they already have; get the caching wrong the other way, and a new release doesn’t reach anyone with a warm cache at all. And because the app is entirely client-side routing, a server that isn’t configured to know that will 404 on a page reload that should have just worked.
Server’s catch
Blazor Server keeps a live connection open per visitor instead of shipping the app to the browser, so it uses more memory and CPU per user than WebAssembly does — fine on a small droplet for a handful of concurrent users, and something you have to plan for beyond that. The live connection also has to be proxied correctly, or it silently can’t stay open and the app just appears to hang with no obvious error.
Either way
Both need HTTPS done right — Blazor Server’s live connection specifically won’t work without it — and a process that’s actually restarted if it ever goes down, not just started once and hoped for.
None of this is exotic. It’s just enough small, easy-to-miss configuration that “it works on my machine” and “it works reliably on a $6 droplet for real visitors” turn out to be different problems.
DotDeployer configures all of this automatically for whichever kind of Blazor app you deploy — see Supported runtimes.