There are plenty of great hosting options out there — Netlify, Vercel, Railway and more. I've tried a few of them and they all have their place. But after going through a few different setups, I landed on a VPS managed with Coolify and it's been the best experience for my workflow.
Here's how I got there.
Where I Started
I started with Netlify. It's beginner friendly, deployment is simple and it works well for frontend projects. I then tried Vercel and that was also a solid experience — great DX, fast deploys, good defaults.
Both are genuinely good platforms. But as my projects grew more complex — running a frontend, a Directus instance, a database — the platform costs and constraints started to feel limiting.
The Raw VPS Experiment
I decided to try self-hosting on an Ubuntu VPS with Nginx as my web server and reverse proxy. Manually configuring everything — SSL, domains, process management, deployments. It was a solid learning experience and I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to understand how hosting actually works under the hood.
But it wasn't the ideal long-term setup. Too much manual work, too much that could go wrong quietly.
Discovering Coolify
Coolify changed things. It's a self-hosted platform that sits on top of your VPS and gives you:
Automatic deployments — push code and your frontend deploys automatically via Git integration
Docker Compose support — I manage my Directus instance and PostgreSQL database through Coolify using Docker Compose, which keeps everything clean and reproducible
Reverse proxy handled for you — no more manually writing Nginx configs
SSL out of the box — certificates are handled automatically
No hidden fees — you pay for the VPS, that's it. Coolify itself is free to self-host
Full Control, Your Way
With a VPS you decide how it's configured. You're not subject to platform pricing changes, compute limits, or vendor lock-in. Everything runs on infrastructure you control.
The tradeoff is responsibility — you manage the server, handle updates, and own any issues that come up. It's not the right fit for everyone.
Is It Worth It?
If you're comfortable with a bit of server management and want a flexible, cost-effective setup for running full stack apps, a VPS with Coolify is hard to beat. It's the sweet spot between the ease of a managed platform and the control of raw infrastructure.
For my stack — TanStack Start on the frontend, Directus as the backend, PostgreSQL as the database — it handles everything cleanly in one place.
Have questions about the setup or want to know if it's a good fit for your project? Drop a comment below.
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