Self-Host PaaS

The pleasant middle ground: you own the box, but a tool gives you the git push to deploy, "TLS just works", and "let me roll back" experience of a managed PaaS.

The candidates

★ Coolify — UI-driven, beautiful, self-hostable; supports Docker Compose, Dockerfiles, Buildpacks, GitHub auto-deploy, databases, S3 backups. The default "I want a Heroku UI on Hetzner" pick in 2026.
★ Kamal 2 (Basecamp) — CLI / config-file driven; rsync-of-Docker-images model; minimal footprint on the host. Most loved by terminal natives.
Dokku — older, command-line; "Heroku in 100 lines of bash"; mature.
CapRover — UI-driven; predates Coolify; less polished today.
Easypanel — newer; freemium; clean UI.
Dokploy — newer Coolify alternative; rising.
Portainer — full Docker / Swarm management UI; not a PaaS exactly but close.
YunoHost — for self-hosting end-user apps (not really a dev PaaS but worth knowing).

What you get

git push deploys — connect a repo, deploys on push.
Automatic HTTPS — Let's Encrypt out of the box.
Zero-downtime rollouts — old container served until new one is healthy.
Built-in databases — Postgres / MySQL / Redis / Mongo with one click.
Backups to S3 / R2 — typically built in.
Multi-environment — production / staging / preview branches.
Webhooks / CI hooks — without writing any pipeline yourself.

What's the actual setup

Roughly:

Provision a beefy Hetzner / Vultr / DigitalOcean VPS — 4 vCPU / 8 GB RAM is plenty for many apps.
SSH in. Install Docker (or let Coolify install it via the bootstrap script).
Install Coolify / set up Kamal / etc.
Point your domain at the box; Coolify gets TLS automatically.
Connect GitHub. Add an app. Deploy.

Typical time from a blank Hetzner box to "the app is up at example.com" is 15 minutes.

Where it shines vs. shines less

Shines:

Indie SaaS, side projects, internal tools, agency client work.
One-or-two-engineer teams.
"I'd use Heroku but it's $50/dyno and I have 12 dynos."

Less ideal:

Strict HA / multi-region.
Compliance-heavy regulated workloads (you'll still need SOC 2 evidence).
Stateful workloads beyond a single primary DB.

Tradeoffs vs. Kubernetes

Faster. No control plane, no manifests, no Helm charts.
Less elastic. Adding nodes is manual; no scheduler.
Less portable. Coolify-specific config doesn't translate to k8s without rework. Kamal config is closer to portable Docker primitives.

Pick this if…

Solo founder → small team. This is the answer.
You want PaaS DX without the AWS bill.
You're moving off Heroku / Render and want to control cost.
You like git push deploys but not Kubernetes.

Skip if you have many teams running on the same hardware, or if you genuinely need autoscaling.