The problem: I wanted the simplicity of Vercel's "push to deploy" workflow but needed to run databases, cronjobs, and long-running processes that serverless platforms don't support well.
The solution: DockerHoster uses nginx-proxy to automatically route traffic to Docker containers based on VIRTUAL_HOST. You just copy a GitHub Actions workflow and docker-compose.yml to any project, and it deploys automatically on push.
What makes it different: - Works with any language/framework (Next.js, Python, Rails, Go, etc.) - Full Docker ecosystem access (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, AI vector DBs, etc.) - No serverless limitations (cronjobs, SQLite, file system access all work) - Tested running 20+ sites on a 2GB RAM DigitalOcean droplet
I personally prefer Cloudflare for SSL because you need DNS anyway, and it gives you free DDoS protection and WAF. For complex projects with multiple services, this is actually simpler than Vercel since everything lives in one docker-compose.yml file.
It's open source and I don't think hosting yourself can get much simpler than this (besides using platforms like Vercel, but then you don't control your infrastructure).
GitHub: https://github.com/jaequery/dockerhoster
Would love feedback and happy to answer questions!