Plausible vs Umami vs Matomo vs PostHog: Self-Hosted Analytics on a VPS (2026)
Every site I run sends its traffic data somewhere, and for years that "somewhere" was Google Analytics. Then GA4 happened, the EU cookie-consent banners piled u...
Every site I run sends its traffic data somewhere, and for years that "somewhere" was Google Analytics. Then GA4 happened, the EU cookie-consent banners piled u...
Every server I run leans on a pile of credentials: database passwords, FTP logins, API keys for Pexels and OpenAI, IndexNow tokens, deploy hooks. Across the se...
Three years ago the open-source virtualization conversation was basically "Proxmox or VMware." VMware's 2024 licensing overhaul under Broadcom blew that up, an...
Every self-hosted service on a VPS eventually hits the same wall: you have three or four apps listening on different ports, you want clean subdomains instead o...
MinIO was the answer almost everyone reached for when they wanted an S3-compatible bucket on their own VPS. That era ended on February 12, 2026, when the MinIO ...
If you have ever stared at a Railway or Render invoice and thought "I could run this myself for the price of a coffee," you are exactly the person these three t...
If you run more than two servers, the question of how to manage Docker stops being a luxury and starts being a daily chore. I hit that wall myself last year. Ac...
Every few months a client asks me the same question: "We're tired of WordPress β what headless CMS should we self-host?" In the last year alone I've stood up ...
If you run your own Git server on a VPS β Forgejo, Gitea, or plain GitLab CE β the next question always lands within a week: where do the builds run? Pushin...
Last month I needed to host a small internal control plane for one of our client projects β nothing fancy, just three services, a Postgres pod, and a job runn...
I have spent the last six weeks running Plane, OpenProject, and Leantime side-by-side on the same Hostinger KVM 4 VPS β 4 vCPU, 16 GB RAM, NVMe β and rotat...
Anyone running production workloads on a VPS in 2026 hits the same wall eventually: SSH-ing into the box, tailing /var/log/syslog, and grepping through scattere...
I spent the last three months running Documenso, Docuseal, and OpenSign side-by-side on the same Hetzner CPX21 VPS (3 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, $9.42/month) to figure out...
Six months ago I migrated a Photography Studio Manager client's 11-year contract archive β about 18,400 scanned PDFs, model releases, invoices, and shoot brie...
If you have an OpenAI API key, an Anthropic key, and maybe a local Ollama box, you are paying for three different web UIs that all do roughly the same thing β...
When I started looking at self-hosted alternatives for the AI features inside our internal stack β specifically SmartExam (an AI question generator), DocSumm ...
When I built the embeddings layer for SmartExam AI Generator last quarter β a tool that turns curriculum PDFs into question banks β I needed a vector store ...
If you run more than three internal tools, you eventually hit the same wall I did: every dashboard wants its own login, your password manager turns into a junk ...
Last month I migrated three of our aggregator sites' image transformation pipeline from a Hostinger VPS-based worker queue to Cloudflare Workers. The trigger wa...
I run seven aggregator sites on Hostinger plus a separate VPS for heavier automation, and over the last 18 months I've moved most of my cross-site glue work fro...
When GitHub went dark for the third time in 18 months last quarter, our deployment pipelines across seven aggregator sites froze mid-push. That was the day I fi...
TL;DR β which one I would deploy today If you have less than 2 GB free RAM on a typical $7 KVM VPS and you need full-text search with typo tolerance for a web...
Connecting a fleet of VPS instances that span Hostinger shared, Hetzner cloud, and a couple of bare-metal boxes used to mean port-forwards, IP allowlists, and t...
Across the seven aggregator sites I run on Hostinger shared and a handful of VPS boxes, I keep coming back to the same question: when does SQLite stop being a "...
Self-hosted analytics finally hit a tipping point in 2026. Between Google Analytics 4 fatigue, the post-April Core Update push toward verifiable first-party dat...
If you're running Redis on a VPS in 2026, you've probably hit the same crossroads I did six months ago: Redis went AGPLv3, your hyperscaler quietly migrated to ...
Self-hosted email is one of those projects that sounds romantic until you spend a Saturday troubleshooting why Outlook is rejecting your DKIM signature. I've ru...
I have been running self-hosted uptime monitoring on a $4.50/month Hetzner CX22 VPS for the last 18 months β initially to keep tabs on seven aggregator sites ...
When I first hit a connection storm on a Laravel app I run on a 4 vCPU Hostinger VPS β the database had 312 idle Postgres backends sitting at 18 GB of RAM whi...
Three years ago I picked Nginx for everything because it was the default in every Laravel deployment guide I had ever read. Today I am running a mix of Caddy, N...
If you're running anything beyond a hobby project β a SaaS app, a multi-tenant platform, or a small cluster of production sites β you've probably landed o...
What Shared Hosting Actually Gives You (and What It Doesn't) Shared hosting puts your site on a physical server alongside dozens β sometimes hundreds β of o...
Why Managed Database Hosting Actually Matters in 2026 When I migrated our SmartExam AI Generator backend from a self-managed MySQL instance on a Hostinger VPS ...
Fly.io vs Railway vs Render 2026: Which PaaS Actually Holds Up in Production? I've deployed Laravel backends, Next.js frontends, and Node.js microservices acr...
Best NVMe VPS Hosting Providers 2026: Real Performance, Real Prices I've been running seven aggregator sites on Hostinger infrastructure since late 2024, and ...
The Short Answer Coolify β best for self-hosted PaaS with a broad ecosystem (the "Vercel on your own VPS" experience) Dokploy β best for resource-cons...
MinIO Community Edition Is Gone: The 5 Best Self-Hosted S3-Compatible Storage Alternatives in 2026 On February 13, 2026, the MinIO GitHub repository was offi...
Why Developers Are Looking Beyond DigitalOcean in 2026 DigitalOcean built its reputation on simplicity: clean dashboard, predictable pricing, fast Droplet prov...
Why Your Object Storage Bill Is Probably Too High Object storage is supposed to be cheap. Yet plenty of developers find themselves staring at an AWS bill that ...
Best Bare Metal Cloud Providers in 2026: Top Equinix Metal Alternatives Compared Bare metal cloud is having a moment. As Equinix Metal shuts down on June 30, 2...
Managed Kubernetes vs Serverless in 2026: Which Cloud Platform Model Fits Your Workload Best? Keyword Target: managed Kubernetes vs serverless 2026, Kubernetes...
The Ultimate Guide to Choosing the Best Cloud Hosting Provider in 2025 Choosing the right cloud hosting provider is one of the most critical decisions for any ...
Thunder Compute H100 vs Runpod Secure Cloud in 2026 is one of those GPU rental comparisons that looks obvious until you inspect the fine print. I have a petty ...
Runpod vs Thunder Compute for LLM inference in 2026 is exactly the kind of comparison that sounds simple until you look past the first pricing table. GPU cloud...
Cheap VPS hunting is one of the internetβs oldest rituals. It sits somewhere between coupon clipping and low-level masochism. You compare RAM, storage, snapsh...
Three months ago I paid $340 for a Ubiquiti UDM Pro to handle routing and firewall duties for a small office network I manage. It died after 11 weeks. The fan b...
Wednesday morning. 6:43 AM. I'm scrolling Hacker News while my instant noodles steep (yes, I eat instant noodles for breakfast β judge me later). A post with...
Oracle Just Fired 30,000 People to Build AI Data Centers β And Your Cloud Bill Might Be Next At 6:03 AM Eastern on March 31st, 2026, thousands of Oracle empl...
A developer named Andrea Marcheschi cracked open the White House's new mobile app last week like a kid opening a birthday present, and what he found inside was ...
A Phishing Campaign Just Hit 340 Microsoft 365 Organizations in Five Countries β And Your Cloud Admin Panel Probably Cannot Detect It I got the Huntress repo...