I'm not spending €50/month on hosting for projects that might never take off. So I put all three on a single €10/month server.
There's also a TeamSpeak server running on it. With Discord now asking for face scans and leaking government IDs, some of us are going back to basics.
What's running on it
MyOwly : a free app that sends you reminders for your subscriptions, free trials, and anything with a due date. Never miss a renewal again.
React, Spring Boot, PostgreSQL
EsportHub.io : an esports platform available as a web app and an Android app.
React, Spring Boot, MongoDB
ProductCompanies : a search engine for European companies that build cool products.
React, Node.js, MongoDB
The server
It's the cheapest dedicated server on OVH's Kimsufi platform. €10/month, and here's what you get:
- CPU: Intel Xeon E5-1620v2 — 4 cores / 8 threads @ 3.7 GHz
- RAM: 32 GB ECC
- Storage: 1 × 120 GB SSD
- Bandwidth: 500 Mbit/s
It's not a fancy cloud instance. It's a real dedicated machine sitting in a datacenter, and it's more than enough.
How it all fits together
The setup is dead simple. One nginx instance handles everything, it receives all the traffic and routes it to the right app based on the domain name.
Each backend runs on its own port:
Internet
│
▼
nginx (:443)
├── myowly.com → React static + Spring Boot (:8086) + PostgreSQL
├── esporthub.io → React static + Spring Boot (:8080) + MongoDB
└── productcompanies.eu → React static + Node.js (:3001) + MongoDB
The frontends? Just static files. React builds into a bunch of HTML, CSS, and JS that nginx serves directly. No Node server needed for that.
SSL is handled by Let's Encrypt, free HTTPS on all domains, auto-renewed.
And each backend is managed by systemd. If something crashes (it hasn't in 78 days, but still), it restarts automatically. No Docker, no Kubernetes, no orchestration. Just good old Linux doing its
thing.
The real numbers
With all three projects running, the server barely notices. CPU usage sits at 1%. I'm using 3 GB of RAM out of 32, that's 28 GB doing absolutely nothing. Disk? 14 GB out of 120.
Each Spring Boot app takes around 500 MB of RAM, the Node.js one takes 110 MB, and the databases combined use about 300 MB. I could realistically throw 15 more apps on this thing before it starts to
sweat.
Why not the cloud?
Every time I look at cloud platforms, I see the same thing: one service for the backend, another for the frontend, a managed database on the side, then you spend an hour wiring everything together. And
at the end of the month, you're paying €20-50 per project for something that has three users.
I'm building a product, not scaling for 100,000 users. These are side projects. They might take off, they might not. I'd rather spend my time shipping features than configuring cloud dashboards.
And if one of them actually blows up? I'll move it to its own dedicated server on Kimsufi, OVH, or Scaleway, European providers first, set up Docker and Kubernetes, and scale horizontally. But until that day comes, a single €10/month box does the job just fine.
There's another benefit I didn't expect: you actually learn how things work. Setting up nginx, configuring SSL, writing systemd services, debugging logs over SSH, none of that happens when you click
"Deploy" on Vercel. Managing your own server makes you a better developer, and that knowledge doesn't go away when a platform changes its pricing.
Wrapping Up
Three full-stack apps, two databases, a TeamSpeak container running in Docker, and the server is still 97% idle. All of that for €10/month.
You don't need Kubernetes. You don't need a managed database at €30/month. You don't need five different cloud services to run a side project. I use a dedicated server, but even a €5/month VPS would handle most side projects better than a patchwork of cloud services.
Start cheap, ship fast, scale when you need to.
Thanks for reading. If you have questions about the setup or want to roast my architecture, the comments are open.
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