You've been lied to about self hosting...

That title might sound a bit aggressive, but this isn't about hating on hosting platforms.

It's about loving the freedom, control, and cost-savings that come from owning your deployment process, without giving up the slick, easy experience we all love.

And yea, shedding some light on the way some of these platforms market anything else as complex or a "devops nightmare".
I'm here to say this isn't necessarily the case.
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A gilded cage

Getting a side project from our local machine into the hands of users is a huge pain.
It's at a stage where it's not making money (or not enough) but tries to grow and serve more users.
You need stability, the ability to scale, hopefully monitor logs and metrics and feel confident it won't crash with the smallest uptick of traffic.

Most of us solve this by turning to PaaS like Vercel, Heroku, or Fly.io.
They're amazing at the start.
You connect your GitHub account, click a few buttons, and your application is live.
It feels like magic.

Someone once told me - "if it feels like magic, you're going to pay".

But this magic often comes with a catch.
These platforms are walled gardens.
The convenience is designed to keep you there, and as your application gains traction and needs to scale, the costs can skyrocket.
Suddenly, you're making decisions based on your subscription tier instead of what's best for your app.
You've traded complexity for a lack of control and a potentially massive bill.

The alternative, becoming a full-blown DevOps expert with Kubernetes, is too complex and time-consuming for a solo developer or a small team.
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Your Own Private Vercel

What if you could have the best of both worlds?
The smooth, "push to deploy" experience of a modern PaaS, but running on your own hardware, completely under your control.
This is exactly what I found with Coolify, an open source project that gives you self hosting superpowers.
It's a control panel you install on your own server, whether that's a cheap cloud VM or a machine running in your home lab, and it gives you everything you need to run a modern web application, and spread it across any kind of infra you have.

Coolify isn't just a deployment script; it's a full platform.
You can spin up databases, add a Redis cache, manage environment variables, and monitor your resource usage, all from a clean dashboard.
It takes the best parts of the PaaS experience - simplicity and power, and hands the keys over to you.
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How to Reclaim Your Deployments

Putting this into action is surprisingly straightforward and doesn't require a DevOps degree (which isn't a thing yet for whatever reason...).

First, you get a server.
This can be an inexpensive cloud instance or any machine you own.
Coolify itself is lightweight, requiring just 2 CPU cores and 2 GB of RAM to start.

Next, you install Coolify with a single command-line script:

Once it's running, you access a web dashboard where the magic happens.

From there, you simply create a new project and point it to your application's code on GitHub.
Coolify is smart enough to detect your Dockerfile, build your container, and deploy it.
Let's stop for a minute here to stress how easy the process is, you litterally connect your repo and witness magic.
Coolify will take everything and bundle it without you having to lift a finger.

The real power comes from what you do next.
​Need a database?
Click to add a Postgres instance, or mysql, or maria or anything from their list.
Does your app need a cache to speed things up?
Add a Redis instance in seconds.
Coolify provides you with the endpoint URLs, which you just add to your application's environment variables.
To complete the setup, you can take the deploy webhook provided by Coolify and add it to your GitHub Actions.
Now, every time you push a new commit, Coolify will automatically build and deploy the latest version.
Yes, you now have CI too 😉.

You've just built your own personal, cost-effective, and powerful deployment platform.
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When's the right time?

Seeing Coolify for the first time made me want to jump ship from other platforms and move everything to run on my own infra.
There's one key thing to remember though, these platforms are usually cheap / free when you start.
It's the scale that kicks you in the n***s.
So when you start seeing some traction, I'd think about starting coolify and porting things over.
Another great use case is having small projects, but a bunch of them.
Most platforms will limit you to a one or two free running projects (for obvious reasons), at which point you'll start spreading them across other systems.
With Coolify, you can keep and track all of them under the same roof, using shared resources and monitoring systems.

I've already started moving some of my large projects, as well as POC of small ones on my home lab and it's been nothing but joy.

If you've been playing with it and had similar (or different!) impressions, please let me know!

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Thank you for reading.
Feel free to reply directly with any question or feedback.
Have a great weekend!