Why I Left Self Hosting

As I was getting into programming, in the late 2010s, the serverless architecture was gaining steam. Lots of people were learning to code, there was a gold rush, companies were hiring left and right. Back then all you need to know is how to centre an HTML div element and you would get hired as a front end developer. One of the biggest things that encourages newbies to get into a new hobby is seeing results quickly. This is true for many things like the gym, games or playing sports. People tend to give up the gym if they don't see progress. In game design there's a principle where you aren't supposed to make a game too hard, if it's too hard people wont play it. The same thing was happening in programming.

Self hosting is a pain for newbies and the serverless architecture was marketed seriously to both enterprise and individual budding developers alike. The promise of the service provider to manage servers and have the developer worry only about the programming was too compelling and it made software development highly accessible to many people. These serverless services came in with enticing free tier pricing in order to capture the market. They were pretty much an offer you couldn't refuse. Except as with anything in the venture capital funded world, that's the classic way to acquire customers, get them used to the convenience, turn off the money spigot and milk them as much money as possible. It was a bait and switch. As it so happened, there came a rise in incidents where, as people's app would go viral, the opaque pricing of their serverless hosting platform would rack up debilitating costs. The stories where, at times, heartbreaking and they themselves went viral on social media. They even led the the creation of the serverlesshorrors.com which detailed the stories as some sort of an archive and cautionary tale. Naturally this give rise to a faction of the development world, long led by the serial builder Pieter Levels, it gained steam. Self hosting became cool, it was a rebellion against the system.

I'll admit, the self hosting movement caught my attention, I wanted to be cool and didn't want to owe Vercel lots of money. As cool as self hosting had become, the technology that enabled serverless infrastructure had become common and popular in the mainstream. The technology in question is Docker and Kubernetes. It turns out managing a server is a chore, if you can avoid it you would and so it happened. Docker and Kubernetes have now become a must for anyone serious about programming. They have sipped into every faucet of the open source world. Everyone is obsessed with Continuous Integration. Don't get me wrong I also love CI/CD too but it's become a pain. Most open source applications have become too complex to self host, they need a lot of expertise, they no fun anymore. I miss the days of simple open source software like KeyCloak, when all you need is the app and proxy server. Gone are those the modern competitors of KeyCloak are seriously complicated to even attempt without burying yourself in their documentation for hours.

As more of these open source projects are become both in demand and complex, a new type of business was born. The new middleman, services that package the complex services for the average developer. I'm referring to services like Railway, Coolify, Fly.io and Render. It's not exactly a new business, even if the days of the simplistic VPS there were servers you could spin up with pre installed software like Wordpress but this is a different beast. These new middlemen services are sophisticated and have some really good user experiences, they are a joy to work with. They brought everything that made serverless effortless to self hosting and perhaps that's problem. It used to be that you would spin up a VPS on your own, it would be all your server costs and that's what self hosting entailed. Not anymore, so many people need your money.

Of these new age self hosting services, I used Coolify. I got it immediately when it became open to the public. At first I was self hosting but soon, I wanted to offload the burden elsewhere and I paid for the paid version. Overall it's a good service, I very much would recommend it to someone without the hung ups I have indicated in this newsletter. I very much enjoyed not having to constantly SSH into myself to fix something every time one of my sites was down, it provided a GUI and most thing could be controlled through it. I was a happy man.

The problem is that Coolify Cloud (the managed version) became another expense. Renting VPS is expensive enough as it is but now there was more costs. I looked for similar services, that are alternatives to traditional services and they were just as expensive. It came to a point where I had to ask myself if it was worth it at all. Now, I think it's worth it but just rarely. The traditional serverless services still run plenty of free tier pricing, if I can get my sites there and only strictly self host services that strictly need a live server. But increasingly I don't build apps that require a live server, I'm cutting costs.