Hosting things on „the cloud™” has become expensive. The free tier often seems tempting and generous but once you hit thresholds of many services you're skyrocketing costs. And with that argument I'm not even getting into the vendor lock-in that many solutions trojan-horse into the convenience of zero-care deployment and hosting options.

Be it your own network attached storage at home with mirrored cloud backups, company internal online office suites, your own platform as a service. Today with the richness that the open-source community provides and the amazing hardware products that have a one-off price with little running costs attached we are very much in a dream land regarding self-hosting your stuff.

Quick overview of what I'm currently using:

• Synology network attached storage: A comparatively cheap solution to very large volumes of locally available, secure and with a little configuration safe backup storage. Comes with a solid office suite and very nice photos cross-platform app similar to what Google or Apple photos apps offer.
• Coolify (hosted on Hetzner): One or a couple of cheap VMs are set up almost instantly with a single command with Coolify. You can run open-source software pre-configured to one-click install on your servers, setup any docker compose service stack, dockerfile or nix package as well as build your own web software on top of these possibilities with many amazing features (easy GitHub connection for CD, feature environments w/ docker compose, TLS termination, …).

Especially web development with large language model agents such as GitHub Co-Pilot agent is very nice with Coolify, docker compose and feature environments. Imagine this:

• You want to build a feature you can imagine roughly
• You create a PR through Co-Pilot agent mode with the description of what you want
• Co-Pilot creates an implementation
• Coolify sees the new feature branch and is able to spin up a full environment of your software with the new implementation automatically
• You get to review both the code and the actual software amazingly quickly

And the best of all: You're not locked into any vendor. You're self-hosted. And you're running all of this cheaply. You're fully in control.

Of course great power comes with great responsibility – but automated updates for your services and servers themselves has also never been easier than with Coolify.