I really appreciated the blog post because it taught me something I’ve always wanted to learn but avoided because PaaS made me complacent.
Three years ago, I tried to publish a website on a VPS in the morning to present it to a client at lunch. This was before ChatGPT. I spent hours trying but got nowhere. At the meeting, having failed to publish it, I had to run it locally and share my screen. I was frustrated.
Later, I discovered Heroku, which solved all my problems. Eventually, I migrated to VPS + CapRover, and now I use VPS + Coolify.
I’m happy with my setup—it works—but I’ve always felt guilty for not knowing how to publish a simple website without Docker.
It took me much longer than I'd like to admit to publish my first bare-metal website on a VM. The main issue was SSL—I could never configure Nginx for multiple sites on the same server with TLS. Setting up DNS and pointing your domain to your server also requires some fiddling. It’s not intuitive, and there aren’t many people doing this, so resources with full end-to-end examples are limited.
However, with tools like Caddy and Let’s Encrypt, the process has become easier. That said, it still involves quite a bit of fiddling if you want to automate everything and make it reproducible without a lot of hassle. Now, I do it all the time for fun. But that said, if it's a static site, then I don't see much point in self-hosting when Cloudflare Page and GitHub Page are so much more convenient.
Three years ago, I tried to publish a website on a VPS in the morning to present it to a client at lunch. This was before ChatGPT. I spent hours trying but got nowhere. At the meeting, having failed to publish it, I had to run it locally and share my screen. I was frustrated.
Later, I discovered Heroku, which solved all my problems. Eventually, I migrated to VPS + CapRover, and now I use VPS + Coolify.
I’m happy with my setup—it works—but I’ve always felt guilty for not knowing how to publish a simple website without Docker.