I’ve been self-hosting things on and off for years. The pattern I’ve settled into is: do the minimum amount of work to make something run reliably, then never think about it again.
Here’s what that looks like in practice.
The stack
One VPS (2 vCPU, 4GB RAM), running:
- Coolify for deployment — a self-hosted Heroku-alike that handles Docker containers, environment variables, and basic health checks
- Cloudflare for DNS and a free tunnel, so I don’t need to expose ports or manage TLS myself
- Restic for nightly backups to Backblaze B2
That’s it. No Kubernetes. No Nomad. No complicated orchestration.
What I run
- A private Gitea instance (mirrors of repos I care about)
- Miniflux (RSS reader)
- A Plausible instance (privacy-respecting analytics)
- A few small personal tools I’ve written
The philosophy
The goal is to spend less than thirty minutes per month on maintenance. If something breaks at 2am, I want to be able to ignore it until morning without anything catching fire.
Coolify gives me one-click deploys and a restart button. Cloudflare handles the scary networking parts. The backups mean I can nuke the whole VPS and rebuild from scratch without losing anything important.
Boring infrastructure is good infrastructure.