Server infrastructure: Hetzner

I chose Hetzner as my hosting provider for several reasons:

💰 Cost-Effective

Hetzner offers some of the most competitive prices in the industry - significantly cheaper than comparable offerings from AWS, DigitalOcean, or Linode. For example, their CAX21 ARM cloud server (Ampere Altra, 4 vCPUs, 8GB RAM, 80GB NVMe) costs just €6.49/month (at the time of writing this). Simple tutorials for setting up servers based on standard images (i.e., ubuntu) or snapshots can be found here. They also made it really easy to set up coolify.

🔧 Management Tools

Their web interface and API make server management straightforward:

  • Easy server provisioning
  • IP management
  • Backup solutions
    • I have automatic backups daily that can easily be restored
  • Monitoring tools

📈 Scalability

While I started with a single dedicated server, Hetzner makes it easy to scale up or down as needed (for as little as an hour at a time). Their cloud instances can be spun up in minutes, perfect for testing or handling traffic spikes. I quickly reached the 40GB limit, but within a few minutes I had doubled the available memory + ram for 3$/month more.

🔒 Security

Hetzner takes security seriously:

  • DDoS protection included
  • Regular security updates
  • Firewall management
  • IP-based access controls

For my self-hosting needs, Hetzner provides the perfect balance of performance, reliability, and cost-effectiveness, and ease of use. Now that I have a VPS, I was able to begin building the variety of applications that lived on my *.misharubanov.com subdomains.

Coolify & Essential Tools

One of the standout tools in my stack is Coolify—an open-source, self-hostable alternative to platforms like Heroku and Vercel.

🚀 Coolify: The Heart of My Deployment

Coolify is a modern management platform that easily lets you deploy applications, databases, and static sites. It supports Docker, integrates with Git, and has a web UI for managing deployments. I use Coolify to:

  • Deploy Python, and static sites directly from GitHub (public and private repos work)
  • Manage Docker containers and images.
  • Spin up databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL with a few clicks.
  • Monitor resource usage and logs in real time.
  • Find inspiration for cool open-source docker-based projects that people have made into one-click deployments

It’s far from a perfect tool - but honestly it’s just a great way to learn how to manage docker containers all living on the same server, each pointing to a different DNS. There are still mysteries to me (and to the self-hosting reddit community) on exactly what Coolify is doing, since it’s just a thin docker + traefik wrapper with a UI. But for now it seems to work well enough - although dealing with how to wire certain apps through my Cloudflare firewall has been quite a pain.

🛠️ Other Tools in My Stack

1. Traefik

Coolify’s default proxy. Traefik automatically handles SSL certificates (via Let’s Encrypt) and routes traffic to my services.

2. Cloudflare

For DNS management, DDoS protection, and caching. Cloudflare sits in front of my self-hosted services for extra security and performance. Cloudflare tunnels also enable secure access to all apps without needing to expose a public IP to the internet - I followed this article which was very helpful.

Monitoring tools

1. Uptime Kuma

A lightweight, self-hosted monitoring tool for seeing whether websites are up or down. I use it to keep tabs on all my services and get alerts if anything goes down.

2. Glance

A nice easily customizable dashboard that let’s me browse RSS feeds, weather, docker containers, websites, and a bunch of other stuff. It’s focused on being very mobile-compatible, which is great for checking on all my self-hosted apps and server when travelling.

3. Duplicati

A straightforward tool for monitoring and setting up backups. I get to back up my files to a variety of cloud services, via WEBDAV, and locally as a final precaution.

4. Dozzle

A straightforward UI for monitoring docker container CPU/memory usage and real-time logs for debugging.

5. ntfy

Push notificaiton service for when any of my subdomains go down.

6. Beszel

Server monitoring. This tool is a fantastic way to see what’s going on with my server - it allows me to set up notifications when memory/CPU are being overused, and it shows me which docker containers are the culprits. Combining this with Dozzle lets me debug any issues quickly.

🏗️ How It All Fits Together

  • Code lives in GitHub.
  • Deployments are handled by Coolify, which pulls from my repos and spins up containers.
  • Traffic is routed by Traefik, with SSL managed automatically.
  • Monitoring is done via Uptime Kuma for in-depth site monitoring and Glance for previews and server stats, with notifications sent to my phone.

Content and other apps

1. Audiobookshelf

My audiobook and ebook content management platform. This was actually the onus for going down this self-hosted rabbit hole - when I discovered that the library of kindle books I purchased was no longer able to be downloaded, I decided that it was time to set up my own library before that updated policy was implemented. Audiobookshelf is a great dockerized app that made it easy to self-host a browse-able library, manage library users, and listen/read in-browser. They also have a great android app, which makes offline listening/reading easier too.

2. Immich

A privacy-friendly self-hosted alternative to Google photos, with a lot of the same features (CV-based facial recognition, etc.). This is something I’m still developing - having TB+ levels of photos means this only makes sense if I connect a NAS to my remote server (buying TBs of storage doesn’t really make financial sense).

3. Gramps Web

After a trip to my see my ancestry in Uzbekistan, I wanted to self-host my family tree and add as much information as we know about our ancestors 4+ generations ago. This app allows me to create users for my family (each who have either editor/guest privileges) and can both modify the family tree and add media files so we can perserve this for future generations. I’m creating both hot and cold backups to ensure that this information sticks around.

4. Vikunja

A nice, lightweight todo app that let’s me keep track of all necessary tasks on my own. This is just nice to give me total control over - it’s similar to the variety of budgeting/finance apps - they aren’t as great as the latest and greatest company apps, but the tradeoff seems well worth it to me.