Cloudflare, Serverless, or VPS: What to Choose in 2026
Cloudflare Workers is the best serverless solution in the world: 0ms cold start, 310 points of presence, single-command deployment. However, it has been blocked in Russia since mid-2025. Rostelecom, MegaFon, MTS, and other major providers are throttling traffic through DPI filters; traffic has dropped by 50% and hasn't recovered. Payments with Russian bank cards have been unavailable since 2022.
In this video, we explore what's really working in 2026: Yandex Cloud Functions, Selectel, AWS Lambda—with numbers, formulas, and no marketing.
0:00 Cloudflare Workers unavailable in Russia
0:25 What is serverless?
0:49 How Cloudflare Workers work
1:20 Cloudflare blocked in Russia
2:02 AWS Lambda: real cold start
2:35 Yandex Cloud Functions: price 30 times higher
3:16 What Russian providers don't have
3:44 How they decide in practice in 2026
4:11 Formula: serverless or virtual machine
Key figures from the video:
— Lambda cold start on Node.js: on average 280ms, in the worst case up to 2 seconds
— Cloudflare Workers cold start: less than 1ms
— Yandex Cloud Functions under constant load: 30 times more expensive than a regular virtual machine
— Yandex's single-core virtual machine: from 400 rubles per month
— 10,000 calls at 200ms per Day = 150 rubles per month for Yandex Functions
Sources:
— Habr, Amvera article: Comparing Yandex Functions and Virtual Machines by Cost
— Official Cloudflare Workers Documentation and R2 Pricing
— Official AWS Lambda Pricing Page
— Cold Start Production Benchmark, Rebalai Blog 2026
#cloudflare #serverless #yandexcloud #awslambda #selectel #vps #infrastructuredevelopment