Managed Traefik Hosting — production-ready from $15 a month
Cloud-native reverse proxy and load balancer. Deployed on your own dedicated instance in AWS, Azure, or GCP, kept patched, backed up, and monitored by ManageStacks — standard Traefik, no lock-in.
Traefik on ManageStacks is the cloud-native reverse proxy and ingress controller deployed to your own AWS, Azure, or GCP region — priced flat at $29 per instance per month, with auto-discovery from Docker and Kubernetes, Let's Encrypt SSL, middleware for auth/rate-limiting/headers, and Prometheus-based observability. Materially cheaper than AWS ALB + WAF or a managed CDN edge tier for high-request-count workloads, and configuration is dynamic — no config files to reload.
What does Traefik do, and why do teams deploy it?
Traefik is a modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer designed for cloud-native environments. Unlike Nginx or HAProxy where you write config files, Traefik auto-discovers services from Docker labels, Kubernetes Ingress/Gateway API, Consul, ECS, or a static file — dynamically configuring routing rules without config reloads.
Traefik ships with Let's Encrypt integration for automatic HTTPS, a middleware system (BasicAuth, ForwardAuth, RateLimit, IPWhiteList, Headers, StripPrefix), canary deployments with weighted traffic splitting, and built-in Prometheus metrics, access logs, and OpenTelemetry tracing. HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, WebSocket, gRPC, and TCP/UDP L4 all supported.
Traefik is Apache-2.0 licensed. Traefik Labs also offers a Business Edition with SSO for the dashboard and enterprise support. ManageStacks deploys the open-source binary; bring your own Business licence if you want enterprise features.
- Auto-discovery from Docker, Kubernetes, Consul, ECS, or static file
- Automatic HTTPS via Let's Encrypt with wildcard support
- Middleware: BasicAuth, ForwardAuth, JWT, RateLimit, IPWhiteList, Headers
- HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, HTTP/3 (QUIC), WebSocket, gRPC — all supported
- TCP + UDP L4 routing alongside HTTP L7
- Canary deployments with weighted traffic splitting per route
Cloud-native reverse proxy and load balancer
What does managed Traefik hosting cost?
Flat per-app pricing, in your chosen AWS, Azure, or GCP region. No per-user pricing — a busy deployment costs the same as a quiet one.
Starter
Staging and internal tools. Dedicated instance, TLS, daily backups, managed upgrades.
Standard
Production workloads. Adds monitoring, staging environment, region choice, priority support.
Business
High-traffic and compliance workloads. Adds a high-availability replica and same-day support.
24×7 SRE retainer
Round-the-clock on-call across every hosted application, for teams that need a pager answered at 3am.
Self-hosting Traefik vs managed — what does it really cost?
The software is free. The engineer-hours are not.
Running it yourself
- Install Traefik on a VM; configure static file, Docker socket, or K8s access
- Set up Let's Encrypt integration + persistent cert storage
- Configure middleware, rate limits, and observability separately
- Track Traefik releases + handle major-version config migrations
- Build request-rate + latency dashboards yourself
On ManageStacks
- Subscribe through your AWS, Azure, or GCP marketplace
- Traefik comes up with Docker/K8s auto-discovery + Let's Encrypt + monitoring
- Grafana dashboards ship for request rate, error rate, latency percentiles per route
- Rolling version upgrades handled by us
- OpenTelemetry tracing available and pre-integrated with Tempo/Jaeger on same account
Traefik on ManageStacks vs the alternatives
How Traefik on ManageStacks compares to the traditional reverse proxies and the hyperscaler load balancers.
| Traefik on ManageStacksUs | AWS ALB + WAF | GCP Cloud Load Balancer | Nginx / HAProxy (self-hosted) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Managed on your AWS, Azure, or GCP | AWS-managed | GCP-managed | You provision + operate |
| Data residency | Your cloud region | AWS region | GCP region | Your cloud region |
| Pricing basis | Flat per instance | Per hour + LCU + GB-processed | Per hour + per-rule + GB | Your compute cost |
| Auto-discovery | Docker + K8s + more | Target groups (manual) | Backend services (manual) | Config-file based |
| Open source | Yes (Apache 2.0) | No (proprietary) | No (proprietary) | Yes (BSD-style) |
| L7 middleware | Extensive | WAF rules | Cloud Armor | Config-file middleware |
Provisioning, upgrades, backups and monitoring on your team’s plate.
What does running Traefik yourself involve?
ManageStacks deploys Traefik with Docker or K8s auto-discovery, Let's Encrypt SSL provisioning, Prometheus metrics + Grafana dashboards, and OpenTelemetry tracing wired in. Middleware for auth, rate limiting, and headers is available out of the box. We handle version upgrades and platform maintenance while your services register themselves automatically.
Traefik key numbers
How long from subscribing to a live instance?
Subscribe
Subscribe to ManageStacks through your AWS, Azure, or GCP marketplace.
Provision
Traefik spins up with auto-discovery configured, Let's Encrypt ready, and Grafana monitoring — typically 3-5 minutes.
Register services
Add Docker labels or K8s Ingress annotations to your services. Traefik picks them up automatically.
Add middleware
Configure auth, rate limiting, headers, and canary weights per route. Live-update — no reloads.
When is self-hosting Traefik the right answer instead?
“Managed hosting is not always the correct call.”
Self-host when a platform team already runs the infrastructure and on-call rotation to operate Traefik at genuinely low marginal cost. Self-host when compliance requires an air-gapped or on-premises deployment that no hosted option can satisfy. And self-host when the deployment depends on heavy customisation with a fast internal build-deploy loop, because an internal release process will beat any managed change process.
For everyone else — teams whose engineers have better things to do than shepherd upgrades — managed hosting is cheaper than the hours it replaces.
Which cloud should Traefik run on — AWS, Azure or GCP?
For most workloads, the choice of cloud matters less than proximity: run Traefik in the same cloud and region as the applications and data it talks to, because every request between them adds a round trip. The underlying compute performs equivalently across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
In practice, an existing cloud footprint decides it. All plans support all three clouds, and moving regions later is a scheduled migration, not a rebuild.
Deepest managed-service catalog, default when there's no existing footprint
Best fit for teams already on Microsoft 365 or Entra ID
Strongest for data/analytics-adjacent workloads
Every plan supports AWS, Azure, and GCP — region choice included.
Common questions about Traefik on ManageStacks
How does Traefik compare to Nginx or HAProxy?
Traefik's key differentiator is dynamic configuration — services auto-register via Docker labels or K8s Ingress annotations without config reloads or downtime. Nginx and HAProxy are more mature (been around 20+ years), have better raw performance per CPU for static workloads, and richer feature sets for complex Layer-7 logic. For containerised, service-mesh-adjacent, or highly-dynamic environments, Traefik is the modern pick. For static high-traffic web serving, Nginx or HAProxy still win.
How does this compare to AWS ALB / API Gateway or a Cloud Load Balancer?
AWS ALB is per-hour + per-LCU + per-GB-processed. GCP Cloud Load Balancer is similar. Both grow with traffic. ManageStacks Traefik is flat $29 per instance. For high-request-count workloads (100M+ requests/month), self-hosted Traefik is materially cheaper. AWS/GCP LBs win on tight VPC integration, managed DDoS protection (AWS Shield), and vendor SLAs; Traefik on flat cost + programmable middleware.
Does Traefik on ManageStacks provision SSL certificates automatically?
Yes. Let's Encrypt integration with HTTP-01 or DNS-01 challenge is configured by default. Certificates persist on storage and renew before expiration. Wildcard certificates supported with DNS-01 challenge (requires cloud DNS provider credentials).
How does auto-discovery work?
Docker: Traefik reads container labels (`traefik.http.routers.myapp.rule=Host(\`myapp.example.com\`)`). Kubernetes: standard Ingress resources or the newer Gateway API. Consul: service registrations. New services show up in Traefik's routing table within seconds — no config file edits.
Can Traefik do canary or blue/green deployments?
Yes. Weighted traffic splitting per route lets you send 10% to a canary and 90% to stable; adjust the weights and Traefik reroutes without reloading. For blue/green, use two service names with weights of 100/0 and swap when ready.
Does ManageStacks provide monitoring for Traefik?
Yes. Prometheus metrics export is enabled by default, with pre-built Grafana dashboards for request rate, error rate, latency percentiles per route, and upstream health. Alertmanager rules for high error rates or slow upstreams ship as templates.
What about rate limiting and DDoS protection?
Rate-limit middleware handles per-source-IP or per-route limits (bursts + sustained rates). For DDoS protection at scale, front Traefik with a CDN or the cloud's DDoS service (AWS Shield, GCP Cloud Armor, Cloudflare) — Traefik focuses on the L7 routing + middleware layer.
What if I want to migrate off?
Traefik config (or K8s Ingress/Gateway resources) is portable. If you move to Nginx, you'll need to translate the routing rules (Nginx uses config files, not labels), but the Ingress spec is portable to Nginx Ingress Controller directly. Migration off is a supported operation.
Run Traefik without carrying the pager
Subscribe through your AWS, Azure, or GCP marketplace. We handle provisioning, SSL, monitoring, backups, updates, and security. From $15/mo.