How I Self-Host

It depends.

Given the scenario: requirements and the constraints, there are some things that I self-host on my home server and other things that I self host on my Oracle free tier VPS. Each of them has its own pros and cons. In summary, my home server has a better hardware and the VPS has a better uptime (fewer network and power issues).

Requirements

• Run as many services as I want.

Constraints

• Hardware/Money

To satisfy the requirements within these constraints, there are solutions to manage and deploy multiple containers on a single machine. You can read more about them in my previous post: Free Alternatives to Heroku, Vercel, Render and Fly: Dokku, CapRover, Coolify, Dokploy.

If you read it, at the end, you would see that I use CapRover on my VPS and Coolify on my home server.

One thing I didn’t mention in that post is that my Coolify instance runs on a Virtual Machine (VM) on top of Proxmox, which is a very cool Operating System (OS) that enables the creation and management of VMs and Linux Containers (LXCs).

Summary

• When I develop/test/learn/play with my side projects, that don’t need powerful hardware but require high availability, like Instats and mrkt, I deploy them using CapRover (or Dokku) on my Oracle free-tier VPS.
• When I need more isolated environment and access to hardware resources, like HomeAssistant and Tibia Server, I create VMs inside the Proxmox running on my home server.
• When I use third-party tools like Excalidraw, n8n and BentoPDF, I create Docker Compose files inside Coolify, which is running on my home server.