Introduction
Self-hosting is the practice of locally hosting and managing applications instead of renting from SaaS providers.
Why Self-Host?
Privacy
When you self-host, you control your data. You can ensure that your data is not being sold to third parties or used for advertising purposes.
Security
You can ensure that your data is secure by managing your own security measures. You can also ensure that your data is not being accessed by unauthorized parties.
Cost
You can avoid monthly subscription fees of the applications by hosting yourself. Avoid licenses by using open-source apps and only pay for the resources you use. You can own the hardware or use a virtual private server to host your applications.
How to Self-Host?
Hardware
Personal Hardware
You can self-host on your own hardware, such as a personal computer, server, or even a Raspberry Pi!
Virtual Private Server (VPS)
You can also use cloud providers like Linode, Hostinger or any of your preference to rent a Virtual Private Server, that is just another computer running a server linux distribution.
Operating System
You can use any Linux distribution to host your applications. Some popular choices are:
I personally use Ubuntu Server for my self-hosting needs. It is easy to use and has a lot of community support. Most of the applications can be deployed via Docker, so it doesn’t matter that much the distribution, as long as it is a headless linux.
Containers
I use Docker to containerize my applications. Docker is a tool that allows you to run applications in containers, which are isolated environments that contain everything the application needs to run. This makes it easy to deploy applications and ensures that they run the same way on any machine.
This way, you can develop and/or test your applications on your local machine and deploy them to your server without worrying about dependencies or compatibility issues.
Managing Applications
To manage my applications, I use Coolify, a self-hosted dashboard that allows me to monitor and manage all my applications in one place. It can be used as a CI/CD tool, monitoring tool, and more. Configure