I Self-Host Everything for Less Than a Coffee a Month

I run a surprising amount of infrastructure on a single cheap VPS, behind Cloudflare, and the monthly bill is roughly the price of a coffee. This is the honest version: what I run, what it really costs, and the tradeoffs that self-hosting fans do not talk about.

What "everything" means here

• Go web services running under systemd, reverse-proxied by nginx.
• SQLite databases for the services (backed up with the WAL discipline I wrote about separately).
• Static site for this very site, generated and served from the same box.
• Analytics via GoAccess on the nginx logs — no third-party script, no cookie banners, no data leaving the box.
• Cloudflare in front for DNS and CDN, so the origin is not directly exposed.

The real numbers

Rough, honest ballpark for a modest single-node workload:

The same workload on a managed platform can run 5–20x that once you add a hosted database, a hosted analytics product, and a hosting plan that scales by requests.

The tradeoffs nobody puts in the post

Self-hosting is cheaper in dollars and more expensive in time and attention:

• You are the SRE. Patches, disk space, log rotation, and "why is the box slow" are your problem, not a platform's.
• Uptime is on you. No managed SLA, no auto-failover. For a solo project that is fine; for something you depend on daily, it is a real cost.
• Security surface is yours. Cloudflare hides the origin, but you still configure ssh, firewall, and updates. A managed platform bundles that.
• Backups are a habit, not a feature. My SQLite backup discipline exists because there is no dashboard button that does it for me.

When it is worth it — and when it is not

Self-hosting on a VPS wins when: you run Go binaries (deploy is a file copy), your data fits a file-based database, you are comfortable being the SRE, and your traffic is modest.

Pay for managed hosting instead when: you have a team, you need a guaranteed SLA, you want to spend zero time on operations, or your workload needs elastic scaling. The dollar difference is often worth buying your attention back.

For a solo developer running a few services, the coffee-a-month box is hard to beat — as long as you accept the job that comes with it. Run the numbers on your own workload below before you decide.