Self Hosting
Self-Hosting & Tinkering brings this topic into one place so the full arc is easy to follow. Start anywhere, or move through the pieces in order to build a cleaner read on self hosting. The Series Coolify: The Self-Hosted Vercel That Mostly DeliversCustomclankerWhen to Self-Host vs. When to Pay: The
Self Hosting
Every IP address on the public internet gets scanned. Not eventually — constantly. Within minutes of spinning up a fresh VPS on Hetzner or DigitalOcean, you'll see failed SSH login attempts in your logs from bots running through credential lists. You're not being targeted. You're
Self Hosting
The pitch for self-hosting always starts with the server bill. A $5/month Hetzner VPS running ten applications. Per-app cost: fifty cents. Meanwhile, those same ten apps on managed platforms would cost $100-300/month. The math looks like a cheat code. But the math is incomplete — it counts server costs
Self Hosting
Everyone who self-hosts eventually has the same Tuesday. The database won't start. The docker volume is corrupted. The VPS provider had a hardware failure and your server is gone. The backup you thought was running hasn't actually run in three weeks because a cron job silently
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