The Road to Hosting Myself

When I first started looking into picking up more freelancing work, I wasn’t planning on becoming a part-time DevOps engineer. Although, I find it rather fun.

I wanted to keep costs low and maintain control, which meant doing things myself: buying the domain, setting up a VPS, managing DNS, building out reverse proxies, containers, and the whole nine yards. It was a lot to learn.

I tried a handful of VPS providers early on. Some with eye-catching “$4/month” offers that quietly doubled after a few billing cycles. Others were fast but locked to one region. Some had zero support, or left security and firewall management entirely up to me without clear documentation.

Eventually, I stopped looking for the perfect fit and started looking globally.

That’s when I found Hetzner, a provider based in Germany. Their pricing was honest. $8/month, no surprise increases, and within a few minutes, I had full control of a machine that’s been solid since. No speed issues. No flaky uptime. No drama.

I host my own site now.

My contact form feeds into a backend I built.

I even run my own blogging platform.

There were growing pains. Firewall configs and security tweaks. It took me a bit to reconfigure the Docker Compose that was set up for my local machine to remap to the VPS directories. But eventually, it all clicked. I built a space I trust, one that I understand from the ground up.

Would I recommend this to everyone? Probably not. But if you’re freelancing or building something for yourself, and you want full ownership of your stack? It’s worth it. These aren’t just technical wins They’re transferable skills you can bring to any client engagement.

Sometimes the best way to learn (or relearn) is to build the thing yourself, break it, and figure out how to fix it. It's good to be back at it.