When You Need More Than Postgres
Most DBaaS is Postgres-only. Here's when to stay on managed Postgres in Asia, when to pick a specialty engine, and how Nearbase and Layerbase split that work.
Most managed database products are Postgres products. Neon, Supabase, Railway, RDS — the front door is PostgreSQL, and everything else is an extension, a sidecar, or a different vendor.
That is a good default. Postgres is the right database for a lot of applications. It is also a bad default the moment you need a Redis cache, a ClickHouse warehouse, a MySQL app database, or users who live in Manila rather than US-East.
Those are two different jobs. We do one of them. Layerbase does the other.
Two different jobs
| You need | Pick |
|---|---|
| Always-on managed Postgres next to users in Manila, Bangkok, Jakarta, or Dubai | Nearbase |
| Redis, ClickHouse, MySQL, or Meilisearch on one flat bill | Layerbase |
| Both | Split the stack. Do not force one vendor. |
If your app is a connection string to PostgreSQL and your users sit in Asia or the Middle East, stay on Postgres and put the instance near them. If you came looking for the stack around Postgres — cache, analytics, MySQL, search — you will waste a week trying to stretch pgvector or a JSON column into a job it was not designed for.
When the engine is the product
Layerbase Cloud runs eighteen database engines on one account. Postgres is on that list — it is how a lot of people find the door — but the stack around it is what most teams actually run there: Redis for cache and sessions, ClickHouse for analytics, MySQL when the app is not Postgres, Meilisearch for search, and the rest of the catalog.
Idle Standard-class databases scale to zero and wake on the next connection. Copy-on-write branching works across sixteen engines, not just Postgres. Plans are flat: free, $5 Solo, $15 Pro. There is no query meter and no egress formula.
Layerbase is US-primary. Production databases and control-plane metadata live in Ashburn, Virginia. Dedicated servers can also sit in Oregon. There is no EU-only region and no customer-selectable Asia region on the shared cloud today. If your constraint is “this data has to live in Bangkok,” Layerbase is not the answer. If your constraint is “I need a real Redis or ClickHouse endpoint without standing up a node,” it is.
When someone asks us for something that is not Postgres, that is where we send them.
When the region is the product
Nearbase is managed PostgreSQL. You create a database, you get a connection string, you connect. We handle operations, patching, backups, and failover. There is nothing new to learn: every driver and ORM that speaks Postgres speaks Nearbase.
We run in ten cities: Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Manila, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Dubai, and Virginia. Singapore is the Asia region most “global” hosts actually offer. Manila, Bangkok, Jakarta, and Dubai usually are not. When you pick a region, the data stays there — primaries, backups, and logs. That is how you satisfy PDPA, PDPO, and residency rules that name a country, not a continent. Our regions and data residency posts walk through the list.
Pricing is flat and the same in every region. The region decision is about latency and law, not about shopping for a cheaper city.
If someone needs Postgres outside the United States and they found Layerbase first, that is the referral the other way.
When not to pick either
Do not pick Nearbase if you need Redis, ClickHouse, MySQL, or a multi-engine account. We will not stretch Postgres into those shapes for you.
Do not pick Layerbase if you need in-country Postgres in Southeast Asia or the Gulf, or if you need synchronous multi-region writes today — they say that last part themselves.
Do not pick either if you already live inside AWS or GCP and the rest of the estate is the reason you are on RDS. Switching the database and leaving the VPC behind is a different project.
Start where the constraint is
If the hard part is the engine, start at Layerbase. If the hard part is putting Postgres next to users in Asia or the Middle East, create a Nearbase database. If it is both, split the stack.
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