Beginner Guide to VPS Hetzner and Coolify
In this technical retrospective (2025), @itsbrgv shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 306 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 156 comments
Hetzner is one terrible company to do business with and I wouldn't recommend their shit client service to anyone. I tried to make data backup work with one of their low cost storage boxes only to have them entirely block my nascent account, demand I hand over ID copies for identity verification and even take a photo of myself to make sure my face matches. Really? Who the fuck are you to demand this? Why don't I go to Wasabi or Backblaze B2 and just... pay for shit to receive it reliably, with no further problems.
I have seen that they do this very frequently to many people for all kinds of convoluted reasons, and often block accounts that have years running because they don't please the requirements of such a demand out of the blue (but without clarifying why they didn't comply well enough)
For example, the Reddit page for Hetzner has no shortage of desperate clients suddenly blocked, and trying to read the corporate runes of this company's policies and whatever means of appealing can be improvised, just so they can regain access to some service they'd come to depend on.
Imagine depending on that for your personally important backend infrastructure or data backup. No thanks, fuck them.
Great summary for beginners like me! Definitely bookmarking it.
One negative feeling however is that the author didn't mentioned Coolify in the article while being stated in the title :(
Another good article on the same topic that I have already bookmarked is: Setting up a Production-Ready VPS from Scratch (https://dreamsofcode.io/blog/setting-up-a-production-ready-vps-from-scratch)
To expand my knowledge on this topic, generally, after I finish reading this type of content, I copy the article link, put it in an LLM and prompt it:
"here's an article on 'topic name/article title': https://article.link. Grasp it, analyze it then expand each section mentioned from your own knowledge. Add additional sections relative to the subject"
What are anyone thoughts on setting up CrowdSec at Coolify's Traefik proxy?
I'm not very familiar with Traefik and ended up reading CrowdSec and Trafic docs when setting up.
Managed to setup CrowdSec on a Coolify instance on Digital Ocean but it requires more fiddling (SSH and sudo nano) than I liked. It was a good learning experience but the resulting droplet instance is not something I'm confident in hosting anything important.
I have also restricted unneeded ports on DO's firewall and configured Ubuntu Pro. I wonder what else I missed?
I might rebuild the server following this guide as CrowdSec seems to be throwing errors/warning during apt update / apt upgrade. Plus this guide feels more complete.
``` specs != performance ``` When I was looking for a hobby cloud provider, I did some benchmarking of similarly spec'd instances. Note that the degree of overcommitting CPU/RAM varies by cloud provider and instance type. I found Vultr to be the most consistently faster than DO. I had used OVH in the past and wasn't interested. I also didn't consider Hetzner because it seemed unlikely they could match performance at their prices. I later saw other benchmarking that showed Vultr as being one of the fastest. That was quite some time ago and I haven't checked lately, but also have no reason to switch.
I only clicked this to see if Coolify could be a compelling option against my current setup, of using Docker Compose for everything on my VM (including a private Docker registry for my images, and a Traefik frontend proxy to route it all).
Zero actual mention of Coolify, and the manual steps to PREPARE for it seem far more complicated than, "Just base your VM on the Docker Compose base image, and then tweak a couple things".
I'll stick with what I have. Nice advantage is that I can migrate from host to host and 99% of it is just copying the Docker Compose YAML file.