Application Hosting Platforms (also called PaaS or 'platform clouds') run applications directly from source code — with the platform owning the build, deployment, runtime, routing, TLS, and scaling layers — so developers ship code without provisioning servers, containers, or load balancers. Core capabilities include Git-integrated deploys (push to deploy), automatic HTTPS and global edge routing, preview environments per branch/PR, managed scaling including scale-to-zero, first-class integrations with framework-specific build pipelines (Next.js, SvelteKit, Remix), managed primitives for databases, caches, and storage, and consumption-based or per-seat pricing. The category spans frontend-first platforms (Vercel, Netlify) and generalist PaaS (Render, Fly.io, Heroku, Railway).