New to WIP?
We're a group of makers shipping together. We help each other stay accountable and reach our goals.
Apply for access
Topics
Other questions
Back
Question
Would you use a tool to automate your VPS setup?
Recently moved all of my apps to a $5/mo VPS using Coolify
Saved tons of $$, and can self-host my NextJS/FastAPI/Ghost/Postgres instances etc.
Coolify has an API that can be used to automate this setup for common self-hosting scenarios (NextJS, Supabase, Gatsby, Remix, Postgres, FastAPI, Mysql, Wordpress, etc.).
Posted a landing page for the idea (indiehost.io), thinking to build a tool that does this for others
Saved tons of $$, and can self-host my NextJS/FastAPI/Ghost/Postgres instances etc.
Coolify has an API that can be used to automate this setup for common self-hosting scenarios (NextJS, Supabase, Gatsby, Remix, Postgres, FastAPI, Mysql, Wordpress, etc.).
Posted a landing page for the idea (indiehost.io), thinking to build a tool that does this for others
Thoughts? Would you use it?
👋 Join WIP to participate
Based on your landing page, I saw you are targeting developers who don't want to mess up with a tool like Coolify.
I would ask this question before going further:
Personally, I'm using Kamal to deploy Rails apps, so I'm not your target audience. But probably many others would! You just have to find your ideal customer profile.
Good luck, Stuart! :)
I second Kamal.
Kamal looks interesting - will check it out
Yes, this is a great point - particularly the "devs love toying with things" part - if it's easy to set up with a bash script, I'll have fun writing a simple script myself and not paying any money for some tool that does that for me.
Great feedback here - thanks Wilbert!
I was actually intrigued by it because I'm thinking of switching off Vercel to self hosted nextjs, but I don't know exactly how much time it would save or what it actually does for me.
If I saw the setup process of a vps with indiehost vs the setup process of just coolify maybe I could have been convinced. Or even just a video of you using it to setup a VPS from scratch would go a long way.
There's a big "movement" with self hosting nextjs so I could see this working.
Thanks Brian - great idea on the video + comparison, will add
I’m not your target audience but if someone from your audience asks me I’d say go for it! So whatever it takes to get the project up and running as quickly as possible.
Thanks Dmitry
I wrote a small article about FastAPI on Kamal atd.sh/kamal
@strzibny wrote the whole book a.co/d/bqcBmha!
Great resources - thank you!
It's handy to have something like this if you don't want to deal with managing infrastructure much yourself, yes.
However I think "generically" targetting indie hackers is the wrong move. Focus specifically on a handful of tech stacks you want to support and target those developers.
The reason I say this is because as a Laravel dev I already have options like this that I use daily in PHP land: Laravel Forge and Ploi.io
I like this much better and will make marketing easier - great idea thanks Nik
I'm not a Coolify user and generally would not recommend it. Wrote a post here explaining why: ben-makes-stuff.beehiiv.com/p…
On the other hand, Dokku and Kamal work with the command line, meaning it's easy to write a simple bash script (and/or GitHub Actions script) to set everything up.
Overall: I think your pricing is reasonable but instead of paying $9 I'd rather have fun writing that bash script. I'm sure some people would be interested in something like this though.
Decent writeup on your issues with Coolify, but I disagree with saying needing two VPS nodes (one for Coolify) is a bad thing.
Coolify is supposed to be a self-hosted provisioning service alternative to the likes of Laravel Forge, for managing the setup of multiple apps. So the usage model in that sense is "correct".
Not familiar with Forge. But, regardless of what model is trying to be emulated, if solution 1 doesn't require an extra node for setup and solution 2 does, I'm going with solution 1 every time.
I'm not getting the point about multiple apps (again, maybe because I'm not familiar with anything related to Laravel) - you can configure multiple apps with Kamal, Dokku, K3s, etc without needing an extra node.
Ultimately: low cost, low complexity, and ease of automation is what I always optimize for and I think that's what most people should optimize for too.
Sure, I'm not saying you're wrong in your decision making. It's more that I'm trying to explain how/what Coolify is actually competing with as a solution rather than being a provisioning solution specific to what you might need.
I believe this is happening because Coolify has chosen to cater to those who "require" redundancy. It's a respectable choice, but in my opinion single (maybe beefy) node is what most indie hackers need (and should stick to)
100% agree. Most people do not need this extra crap, just deploy one VPS and put your apps on it. That was the point I was trying to make in my blog post as well.
It totally resonates with me. I especially appreciated the sane defaults subsection.
And wow, I didn't expect k3s to take nearly 15% of ram! I haven't used it in a while, maybe it got bloated?
Btw, have you tried k0s?
Thanks for the kind words! Glad you liked it.
Have not tried k0s - there are a few of these "kubernetes but simpler" tools that all attempt to prepackage k8s into an installer and make it more efficient. k0s appears to be a bit more customizable, but by default probably has the same issues I pointed out with k3s.
I think k3s/k0s are good tools if you need horizontal scaling - but seeing as:
1) Most people do not need horizontal scaling, at least not in the beginning
2) Dokku supports k3s as a scheduler: dokku.com/docs/deployment/sch…
=> You can just start off with Dokku + local docker scheduler and later change the scheduler to k3s globally or per app as needed.
Totally on the same page, I was just curious.
In my opinion multi-node and elastic scaling has been way overblown over the last years of AWS/GCP/Azure marketing campaigns. They did a good job though 🤣
Haha yep. I think we also have to keep in mind that server hardware has continued to get better and better, which has made horizontal scaling less and less necessary.
So probably 50% marketing hype and 50% moore's law :)
Looking further into Dokku and Kamal - thanks for the article and feedback on pricing
Agreed, love writing the bash scripts
No problem. I personally think Dokku would be a great platform to base something like this off of.
You can automate everything with bash commands and there's absolutely zero resource consumption at idle, because all Dokku does is provide a thin bash-based wrapper around Docker/K3s/Nomad.
Kamal - similar. But I didn't like version 1 which was quite unstable with weird design choices. Version 2 looks better and seems to have addressed the most serious concerns I had so it's definitely worth a look too, although my personal preference is to Dokku because Kamal requires some esoteric config file to get anything deployed. Some people like the config file though.
Dokku or Kamal might be the way to go - looks like I can have a lot more control vs. being dependent on Coolify's API and the docs seem extensive. Going to explore this route, thanks Ben
Yep, documentation is one of the big reasons I went with Dokku in addition to the better design choices. Seriously good docs - and that's how you can tell the maintainer gives a shit about the project
Coolify does have pretty decent docs as well, but definitely not as detailed as Dokku
So the best way to use coolify is to pay for coolify cloud and then get your own vps.
Coolify has a self-hosted version though. How are you positioning your solution? I saw your landing page. Are you just selling a hosted version of Coolify with you managing it at a slightly lower price?
Coolify still requires configuring your servers + resources + understanding of Coolify (e.g. proxies, redirects, ssh keys, backups, etc.)
Indiehost would be even more of an abstraction (sign in with cloud provider + connect git repo and it does the rest)
Of course, the abstraction has its drawbacks (less control), so would be targeting simpler use-cases
Then a possibly, closer reference might be cpanel.net
Already use ploi.io for this. One thing I think could be a game changer was a UI on top of kamal where I can manage and monitor things without having all the credentials and code locally. Also this tool could help with setting up a CI/CD pipeline that works with kamal.
Hadn't heard of ploi thanks for the link. Like the UI idea - would you pay monthly for a tool like that?
Hmm maybe, but then it would have to be really good haha.