My VPS
The idea
The idea came, when I first heard about self-hosting in one of Fireships videos on YouTube:
Right at the end of the video, he talks about Coolify and how it can function at a self-hosted version of Vercel.
Since I was already hosting a portfolio of mine on Vercel and had a running instance of Actual Budget on PikaPods, I got curious.
What is self-hosting about? What is Coolify? Could that be something for me?
The setup
I went into research mode and hacked together some information about Coolify on my Notion:
First, I needed to decide on a VPS provider. I was struggling to decide between Hostinger and Hetzner:
| Provider | vCPUs | RAM (GB) | Disk space (GB) | Traffic (TB) | Price / Month (€) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hetzner | 4 | 8 | 80 | 20 | 8,09 |
| Hostinger | 2 | 8 | 100 | 8 | 5,99 |
During my research, I found out that Coolify has a referral link for Hetzner (this one), giving you a bonus of 20€ when used.
In the end however I decided on using Hostinger, since their offer was a bit better and I already had an account there.
Only later did I find out about other interesting providers
I bought my Hostinger VPS at the end of January 2025 and instantly installed Coolify. I've been experimenting with it ever since - and I love it!
What it is now
At the time of writing, I've got 20 services and my portfolio website on that VPS. Some services are not always running of course, but this is what my Grafana dashboard is reporting at the moment:
That is with 35 docker containers running. This is a list of all the current services:
Services indicating a Not found status aren't running right now.
All of this for just 5,99€ per month and some brain grease.