Strapi vs Directus vs Payload: Self-Hosting a Headless CMS on a VPS (2026)
Every few months a client asks me the same question: "We're tired of WordPress — what headless CMS should we self-host?" In the last year alone I've stood up ...
Every few months a client asks me the same question: "We're tired of WordPress — what headless CMS should we self-host?" In the last year alone I've stood up ...
Self-hosting your error tracker used to mean one of two things: pay Sentry's SaaS bill every month, or surrender a chunk of your VPS to run Sentry's full open-s...
If you run your own Git server on a VPS — Forgejo, Gitea, or plain GitLab CE — the next question always lands within a week: where do the builds run? Pushin...
For the past two years I have run all my operational alerts — cron failures, blog import errors, SSH fail2ban trips, IndexNow rejections — through a...
Last month I needed to host a small internal control plane for one of our client projects — 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 — 4 vCPU, 16 GB RAM, NVMe — and rotat...
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 — 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 —...
When I started looking at self-hosted alternatives for the AI features inside our internal stack — specifically SmartExam (an AI question generator), DocSumm ...
When I built the embeddings layer for SmartExam AI Generator last quarter — a tool that turns curriculum PDFs into question banks — 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 quarter I migrated three of our seven aggregator sites off Cloudflare Tunnel onto Pangolin running on a $7/month Hetzner VPS. The trigger was specific: Clo...
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...
Self-hosting your photo library used to be a nerd hobby. After Google Photos quietly tightened its free storage in 2021 and Apple kept nudging iCloud subscriber...
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 — 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...
I have been running self-hosted password infrastructure for our team at Warung Digital Teknologi (wardigi.com) since late 2022. Across the 50+ client projects w...
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...
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 — initially to keep tabs on seven aggregator sites ...
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 ...
I have been running into the same wall for over a year now: my GPU has 24GB of VRAM, the model I want to load needs 32GB, and buying a new card costs more than ...
At 10:53 AM on March 17, 2026, CISA — the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — added CVE-2025-47813 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilitie...