The Complete Guide to Self-Hosting & VPS Management
Everything on this blog about self-hosting, VPS management, and running your own infrastructure — deployment tooling, monitoring, and self-hosted AI — collected in one guide for anyone running their own apps on a VPS rather than a fully managed platform.
Choosing Your Deployment Tool
- Coolify vs. Plesk: A Real Comparison — a genuine head-to-head: Coolify for modern Docker/Git-based app deployment, Plesk for traditional hosting-panel needs (email, classic PHP/WordPress hosting)
- Actually Using Coolify: A Practical Workflow — the real day-to-day: connecting a Git repo, environment variables, automatic SSL, push-to-deploy, and running multiple projects on one VPS
Monitoring What You're Running
- Why You Should Use Uptime Kuma to Track Your Website Health — free, self-hosted uptime monitoring with certificate-expiry tracking, alerting, and a public status page, at no recurring SaaS cost
Self-Hosted AI
- When Self-Hosted AI Actually Makes Sense — the honest tradeoffs between self-hosted models (DeepSeek, LLaMA) and API-based providers: data privacy, cost-at-volume, and what self-hosting actually requires
A Typical Self-Hosted Stack
A common pattern across the projects covered on this blog: Coolify managing deployment on a VPS, Uptime Kuma monitoring everything running on it, and — for projects with real-time data needs like the crypto tracker build or the livescore apps covered elsewhere — a Node.js backend with WebSockets, all deployed and monitored through the same self-hosted infrastructure rather than stitching together several separate managed services.
Why Self-Host at All
The throughline across this guide: self-hosting trades some operational responsibility (you maintain the VPS, the deployment tooling, the monitoring) for meaningfully lower recurring cost and full control — no per-project SaaS billing, no vendor lock-in, and infrastructure that scales with what you actually need rather than a platform's pricing tiers.
