I left the Cloud to Coolify

Steve Yonkeu — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 15:23:56 +0000

Before throwing the first stone at me, think twice and calm down so I can explain why I am doing this.

For a long time, I did what most developers do: I deployed everything on the big cloud providers. AWS, managed services, endless dashboards, monthly bills that always seemed to creep up…

It worked — until it didn’t.

At some point, I realized I wasn’t paying for “infrastructure,” I was paying for complexity. So I decided to leave the traditional cloud setup behind and move to something simpler: Coolify.

Before getting to know why we switch from cloud to coolify, ask yourself "what is the cloud?"

What is the cloud?

As many might know, the "cloud" is a myth, it does not exist. What exist is someone's else computer which you are running your code on and paying the person per resources use, per time spent, often known as the pay-as-you-go billing method.

Conventionally, The cloud is a network of remote servers on the internet that store, manage, and process data, allowing access to files and services from anywhere.

Why I Left the Cloud?

The cloud is powerful, but it comes with tradeoffs:

Costs grow fast, even for small projects
Managed services are convenient… until you need to migrate
Too many moving parts for simple apps
Vendor lock-in is real I wanted something closer to the old-school VPS experience, but with modern developer tooling. That’s where Coolify came in.

What is Coolify?

Coolify is basically an open-source alternative to platforms like:

Vercel
Heroku
Netlify
Render But instead of deploying on their infrastructure… You deploy on your own server.

It gives you:

Git-based deployments (Webhook or Manual)
Docker support
One-click databases
Automatic SSL
Monitoring
Multi-app hosting All with a clean UI.

My Infrastructure Setup

I wanted something:

Affordable
Reliable
Simple
Scalable enough for side projects and small production apps So I went with:
1 VPS
Docker
Coolify managing everything
OVH as the provider The setup is minimal:

Internet → VPS → Coolify → Apps + Databases

Coolify becomes your control panel for deploying:

Web apps
APIs
Postgres / MySQL
Redis
Background workers

I personally used OVH, mainly because of the price-to-performance ratio.

OVH servers tend to offer:

Strong CPUs
Good bandwidth
Cheap monthly pricing
European hosting options

My Setup

I purchased a VPS from OVH cloud for a year at less than USD100 flat rate.

How to Install Coolify (Step-by-Step)

Provision a Fresh VPS Ubuntu 22.04 works best. Make sure you have:
Root SSH access
Ports 80/443 open
A domain name ready (optional but recommended)
Run the Coolify Install Script
SSH into your server:

ssh root@your-server-ip

Then run:

curl -fsSL https://cdn.coollabs.io/coolify/install.sh | bash

This installs:

Docker
Docker Compose
Coolify

Access the Dashboard Once installed, visit:

http://your-server-ip:8000

From there you can:

Create projects
Connect GitHub/GitLab
Deploy your first app
Replace the default domain with yours.

Note: Sometimes this might not work if you do not open the port 8000 on the server.

# Check ports status
sudo ufw status

# Open inbound requests to port 8000
sudo ufw allow 8000

# Reload firewall
sudo ufw reload

Add a Domain + SSL Coolify makes this ridiculously easy:
Add your domain in the app settings
Enable SSL
It automatically uses Let’s Encrypt No need to manually Nginx configs. Coolify uses traefik and caddy in replacement of nginx.

What I Host on Coolify Now

Since switching, I’m running:

Personal projects
APIs
PostgreSQL databases
Redis
Background workers
Internal tools All from one dashboard. It feels like having my own mini-Heroku.

Little tip: This might be life saving to turn on proxied connections on Cloudflare for your domain to avoid some common attacks related to proxy like DDoS.

Now what will you do?

Just so you know, I am an AWS certifies solution architect. I understand products can not start to be built on big giant solutions but we rather turn to use it when we find real need for it.

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