Since I've cut my server costs down from ~$300/m to ~$25/m thanks to Coolify and Hetzner, this post shares my journey away from DigitalOcean and Serverless, and how and why you could do it too!
For context, Coolify is an open-source, self-hostable platform that can be used as an alternative to paid cloud deployment services like Vercel or Heroku. Here's how it saved me so much time and money:
Serverless: You Pay for Convenience 🐍
This very Prototypr.io site runs with Strapi, and the easiest way to deploy Strapi a couple years ago was with Heroku, or Digital Ocean App Platform! While simplifying deployment, it came at a cost. The app (dev+prod) cost me $50/m, and the database another $30/m. With separate VPS for other apps, my DigitalOcean bill was coming to ~$200 a month:
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It was just easier to pay.
I had separate VPS 'Droplets' created from '1 click deploy' servers for separate apps such as Plausible, Meilisearch, and my Prototypr Next.js Frontend. So the Droplets themselves came up to $82.
On top, I had Vercel and MongoDB bills. The easiest way to deploy a MongoDB app was on MongoDB, so after being enticed with their free credits, ended up paying $60 a month.
I kept paying those prices because I had no idea how to get out. Data from user content and signups was accumulating in these databases, and I had no clue how to migrate. It was easier to just pay. 😕
👼 Coolify is the new Serverless
I knew Hetzner offered cheaper servers, but could never move my VPSs either, as it was just too much work! For my most expensive VPS, I could pay $15 on Hetzner instead of $50 on DigitalOcean:
The problem was, moving my VPS meant recreating and configuring Nginx, PM2 and all sorts of services – too much work! It was easier to just pay. How could I recreate each service running on the App Platform or Mongo Cloud too? I was trapped...until Coolify!
Convenience for free 😍
Enter Coolify - an open source cloud deployment platform! As with Digital Ocean App platform or Vercel, Coolify can create apps and services in 1 click. But what's amazing is that you can deploy multiple apps to a single server, very easily!
I bought some servers from Hetzner, and was able to recreate all my projects from Digital Ocean App Platform, and even replace my $50 VPS on the $15 Hetzner server managed by Coolify. Here's all my Prototypr services running on 1 VPS:
For a first time setup, I followed this amazing walkthrough. I follow this walkthrough every time I set up a new server to run with Coolify too:
This was another tutorial that I found really useful:
Use AI to help Migrate your Databases!
Even though I had Coolify running for a few projects, I was still paying for Digital Ocean to host the Prototypr site because of data. Moving my apps was easy, but I was still trapped on Serverless because of databases – data such as posts and content was all confusing to move!
🤖 AI is good at servers
Migrating databases would've been a stumbling block for me, but today it's much easier thanks to AI. Since Coolify runs with Docker, you can connect to any of your apps from your terminal. This is a great entry point for AI.
For databases, Coolify shows you a connection string - you can just ask AI how to migrate and it'll give you the commands to run. Just keep asking it and you'll get there, e.g.:
I managed to get a dump of my database and import it to the Coolify Postgres app. Now all my Prototypr projects are running on Hetzner + Coolify. For more on that, here's another note on using Coolify for deploying a Strapi application.
Overall, with the tools out there today such as Coolify, plus all the help you need at your fingertips with AI (even for free with Trae or Deepseek), I am pretty sure there's never been an easier time to self-host – give it a go, and if you're stuck maybe get in touch if you can find me.
Finally, if you're gonna use Hetzner, use my referral to Get €20 Hetzner Cloud Credits on the house.
