The Hardware: We’re using a single Hetzner VPS (~$25 USD/mo) providing:
8 vCPUs
32GB RAM
200GB NVMe
The Architecture: Instead of a fleet of microservices, we run everything on this one node using Coolify as a self-hosted PaaS. It gives us a Heroku-like experience (Red/Blue deployments via GitHub webhooks) without the per-resource cost.
The Stack:
Frontend/Backend: Next.js and Bun.
Database: SQLite. Since it’s just a file on the NVMe, latency is near zero.
Queues: BullMQ orchestrated via a local Redis instance.
Storage: Self-hosted S3-compatible storage for assets.
Why we did this: We found that vertical scaling is underrated. With 32GB of RAM, we have massive headroom. Using SQLite removes the need for managed DB overhead, and Coolify handles the "plumbing" (SSL, networking, backups).
It’s been surprisingly stable and "just works." I'd love to hear from others who have ditched complex cloud infra for "boring" single-server setups, or any questions on the trade-offs we've made.
Link to article [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-we-chose-coolify-hetzner-...]
icemelt8•1w ago
The Hardware: > We’re using a single Hetzner VPS (8 vCPU, 32GB RAM, 200GB NVMe) for ~$25/month. Compared to the big cloud providers, the vertical scaling headroom here is massive for the price.
The Stack:
Orchestration: Coolify (self-hosted PaaS). It handles SSL, GitHub-triggered Red/Blue deployments, and Docker management.
Runtime: Next.js and Bun.
Database: SQLite. Having the DB as a local file on NVMe makes latency negligible and simplifies backups (it's just a file copy).
Workers: BullMQ via Redis.
Storage: Self-hosted S3-compatible storage on the same node.
The goal was to see how far we could get before needing a distributed system. So far, the performance has been excellent, and "it just works." Happy to answer any questions about the setup or the trade-offs of going single-server.