Managed Hosting is Dead to Me (For Personal Projects)

The Early Days: Bash Scripts and Hope

Back in the 2000s, setting up a server meant crossing your fingers, praying to the sysadmin gods, and slogging through endless tutorials just to get anything online. It was a mess. Every personal project meant manually installing packages, configuring web servers, databases, user permissions — and when (not if) something went sideways, you were on your own. Bash scripts existed, but no one I knew bothered for small personal apps. It took too much time and honestly, most of us were just happy if the thing ran at all.

Then Heroku Happened

When Heroku dropped, it was magic.
git push heroku master felt like conjuring deployment ninjas out of thin air. No more server setup hell — at least for Rails apps at first.

Where It Fell Apart

Heroku was (and still is) great — until you needed real horsepower or fine-grained control. Dynos were a black box. Costs scaled stupidly fast.

AWS isn’t much better now with vCPUs, but at least you can kinda guess what you’re buying. Dynos were just vibes. Even before anything was “vibes”.

Death by a Thousand $5 Apps

Over the years, personal projects pile up. $5–$20 per app sounds cheap… until you have 20 apps you forgot about, quietly draining your wallet.

It’s death by subscription creep.

Missing the Good Old VPS Life

I miss paying once for a VPS and throwing every dumb app idea I had onto it. Disk space was cheap, CPU was idle, life was good.

No worrying about whether an app was “worth” paying another $10/month for. I just shipped it.

The Plan: Back to Basics (With Containers)

I’m heading back. VPS + containers.
Tools are better now — setting up Docker (or Podman, Kamal, whatever) is way less painful than old bash scripts.

If it’s easy, I’ll use it. If not, I’ll find something easier. Minimal friction or bust.

(Side note: Need to check out Traefik. Could ditch nginx.)

The Math Just Makes Sense Again

One VPS, one flat rate, 20 apps.
Adding apps doesn’t cost more unless I actually hit limits. Unlike managed hosting, where every extra app = another $5–$10 charge.

DigitalOcean’s “$5 app” model feels like a casino — lots of little bets that always favor the house.

What’s Staying (For Now)

The only thing sticking around for a bit is my prepaid managed WordPress hosting. (Because, yeah, I already paid for three years.)

But when that’s up? We’ll talk.