Self Hosting
Self-hosting email is the final boss of the self-hosting hobby. You can run your own web servers, databases, file storage, and monitoring dashboards on a $5 VPS without breaking a sweat. Email is different. Email is a federated system where your ability to send messages depends entirely on whether Gmail,
Self Hosting
A VPS gives you a Linux box and tells you good luck. A managed platform gives you a deploy button and sends you a bill. The actual decision between them has nothing to do with which is "better" — it's a math problem with three variables: money,
Self Hosting
Cloudflare's free tier includes DNS hosting, a global CDN, DDoS protection, SSL/TLS termination, basic WAF rules, and five page rules — for zero dollars, indefinitely, with no credit card required. If that sounds too good to be true, it isn't. Cloudflare's business model subsidizes
Self Hosting
Docker packages an application with everything it needs to run — the code, the runtime, the libraries, the config — into a single unit that works the same way on every machine. That's it. That's what Docker does. The enterprise ecosystem around Docker — Kubernetes, Swarm, multi-stage builds, CI/
Self Hosting
Hetzner is a German hosting company that sells cloud VPS instances, dedicated servers, object storage, load balancers, and managed Kubernetes — at prices that make DigitalOcean look like a luxury markup and AWS look like a wealth extraction scheme. A 4-vCPU ARM server with 8GB of RAM runs €4.49/month.
Self Hosting
The self-hosting community has a gravitational pull. Once you successfully deploy one service on your own VPS — once you see Nextcloud running on hardware you control, serving files without a monthly fee to anyone — the instinct is to self-host everything. Every SaaS subscription becomes a personal challenge. "I could
Self Hosting
Coolify is an open-source platform-as-a-service you run on your own server. It handles Git push deploys, SSL certificates, database provisioning, and environment variables from a single dashboard — essentially what Vercel and Netlify do, minus the edge network and polish, running on a VPS you control. As of early 2026, it
Search Rag
AI search tools put citations at the center of their value proposition. Perplexity shows inline numbered references. ChatGPT links to the pages it browsed. Gemini cites its sources. The implicit promise is clear: this answer isn't just generated — it's grounded in real sources you can verify.
Search Rag
The pitch is that AI search — Perplexity, ChatGPT with browsing, Gemini — will replace Google. The pitch has been running since late 2023 and Google's search revenue keeps going up. That doesn't mean the pitch is wrong. It means the pitch is imprecise. AI search is genuinely
Search Rag
Every product demo for "AI knowledge base" tools shows the same thing: someone uploads a pile of company documents, asks a question in natural language, and gets a perfect answer with a citation. It looks like the end of internal wikis, search portals, and that one person in
Search Rag
Vector databases are the storage and retrieval layer for RAG systems and semantic search. They store embeddings — numerical representations of text — and find the ones most similar to a query. Every "chat with your data" product runs on one. The question most developers actually need answered is not
Search Rag
Retrieval-Augmented Generation — RAG — is the architecture pattern behind every "chat with your data" product you've seen demoed on Twitter. It is the most important and most over-applied pattern in AI application development right now. Understanding what RAG actually does at the technical level, when it'