Self-Hosting Everything in 2025
Vercel, Supabase, and Clerk are convenient until they're not. Here's my complete self-hosting setup — Coolify, Hetzner, and open-source alternatives to every SaaS I used to pay for.
Why Bother Self-Hosting
Cost is the obvious answer. A €5/month Hetzner VPS does what $40/month of managed services did for my side projects. But the real reason is understanding. When you run your own stack, you understand every layer. That knowledge is permanent.
The Server Setup
Hetzner CX22: 2 vCPU, 4GB RAM, 40GB SSD, €4.15/month. Ubuntu 24.04. That's the foundation for everything I'm about to describe. For larger workloads, CX32 at €9/month handles serious traffic.
Coolify: The Heroku Replacement
Coolify is a self-hosted PaaS. Connect your GitHub, point at a repo, it builds and deploys. Automatic SSL via Let's Encrypt, environment variable management, one-click deployments. Free and open-source. Install with a single curl command.
Services I've Replaced
Supabase → self-hosted Supabase (yes, it's possible). Vercel → Coolify + Caddy. Clerk → Keycloak. Notion → Outline. Datadog → Grafana + Loki + Prometheus. The hardest replacement was auth — Keycloak has a steep learning curve.
Backups: The Part Everyone Skips
Automated daily backups to Cloudflare R2. 30-day retention. Tested monthly. If you're not testing restores, you don't have backups — you have false confidence. I lost data once. Never again.
When Not to Self-Host
Production apps with SLAs, anything that handles payments at scale, services where the ops burden outweighs the savings. Self-hosting is a trade: you pay with time instead of money. Know which you have more of.
