Recently, I set up a VPS on Hetzner to host some of the services I rely on every day. Hetzner is based in Germany (great for GDPR and privacy), and the pricing/performance balance is really solid, I’m paying just €4/month for all of this!

I’ve always been into open source and owning my data, and this setup is a big step forward in that direction.

Why a VPS?

I used to self-host some of these things at home, but I’ve now moved my most important services to a VPS, mainly for reliability.

At home, I was always a bit nervous about outages. Power cuts, flaky internet, or even the cat accidentally unplugging something (or worse, chewing on a fiber cable)... not fun when you're away from home and need access to, say, your passwords. With a VPS, I don’t have to worry. It’s always online.

The Stack: Coolify for Easy Management

To manage everything, I’m using Coolify. It's an open-source PaaS that makes deploying and managing containers painless. You connect your Git repo, and it takes care of the deploys, SSL (thanks to Traefik or Caddy under the hood), and remote management.

I plan to take a look at Dokploy in the near future to see what it has to offer over Coolify !

What I'm Hosting

Here’s a quick tour of the services I’ve got running:

  • Immich – Self-hosted photo management (like Google Photos). Supports multiple users too. I love it.
  • Vaultwarden – Bitwarden-compatible password manager. Super lightweight and I get to fully own my vault.
  • Directus – Headless CMS I use to manage my website content. This blog post was written in it!
  • Nextcloud AIO – My own little Google Drive replacement with file sync, calendar, contacts, and some Office tools built in.
  • Affine – An open-source Notion alternative. Still maturing, but already quite useful for notes and docs.
  • Cloudflared – For Cloudflare Tunnels, which let me expose services securely without opening ports.

All of these are running in Docker, managed via Coolify.

Backups: custom scripts with Bun

For backups, I rolled my own simple system using Bun scripts. They back up Vaultwarden and my site’s database to a self-hosted Minio instance (open source S3-compatible object storage solution). It's fast, lightweight, and just works. Bun was a no brainer thanks to its ability to compile down to a single executable, it makes the whole system portable and easy to run without dependencies.

I’ve open-sourced the backup scripts in case they’re helpful: 👉 https://github.com/nicolassutter/vps_backups

Final Thoughts

When I started self-hosted, paying for something I could host myself at home was not something I planed... but I have to say it's not bad for peace of mind, full data ownership, and a private alternative to a bunch of closed cloud tools.

If you’re thinking about self-hosting or moving your stuff off the cloud, I definitely recommend giving Hetzner and Coolify (or Dokploy) a try. And if you want to talk shop or ask about my setup, feel free to reach out!