Self-hosting on a $5 VPS, one year in

One Contabo box, a handful of my projects, nginx in front, PHP 8.3-FPM behind, Postgres and SQLite where appropriate, Certbot for SSL, a hardened SSH config, fail2ban, ufw, the usual. A year in, here's the honest summary.

What goes wrong

• SSL renewals — exactly once, and only because I forgot to verify the post-renewal hook.
• Disk fill from log rotation misconfig — once. find /var/log -size +500M finds the culprit fast.
• nginx config conflicts after editing in a hurry — twice, both my fault, both caught by nginx -t.

What never goes wrong

• Uptime. Contabo has been quiet.
• SSH access — once the keys-only config is on, it's on.
• PHP-FPM. It just runs. Years of complaints about PHP and the runtime is the calmest thing on the box.

The real lesson

"Self-hosting" sounds intimidating in tweets. In practice it's a one-evening checklist you do once and a thirty-minute audit you do every quarter. The 90% that's "DevOps" is boring and learnable. The 10% that's interesting is whatever your apps are doing on top.

I'm not paid to host anything. I host because it's cheaper than any of the managed alternatives at my scale, and because the day I move to a managed thing I lose the ability to debug a problem in the actual layer it lives in.