The latest articles on DEV Community by Zeyrian Faris (@zeyrian_faris). https://dev.to/zeyrian_faris https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F3950809%2F08e57afc-a6c6-4b72-bc60-0be9c27653db.jpg https://dev.to/zeyrian_faris en Zeyrian Faris Mon, 25 May 2026 14:37:30 +0000 https://dev.to/zeyrian_faris/how-i-self-hosted-my-flask-app-on-an-old-laptop-for-almost-free-52h9 https://dev.to/zeyrian_faris/how-i-self-hosted-my-flask-app-on-an-old-laptop-for-almost-free-52h9 <p>I recently built fourpointo, a Flask web app for polytechnic students to manage assignments. Once it was working locally, I needed to get it live without paying for cloud hosting every month.</p> <p>Then I realised I had an old, unused laptop which I was trying to find a purpose for. I figured it would be great to use it as a home server to host my website and it saves costs.</p> <p>I wiped the laptop and went with Ubuntu Server since it's lightweight and widely used. There's plenty of documentation if I got stuck.</p> <p>I then cloned fourpointo from my new laptop onto my server.</p> <p>When developing fourpointo, I used Python's Flask library. However, Flask's built-in server is single-threaded and not designed to handle multiple requests at once. Gunicorn is a production-grade server that runs multiple workers so it can handle real traffic.</p> <p>After installing Gunicorn, I got the domain fourpointo.app from Namecheap which serves as the URL for my app.</p> <p>I then used Cloudflare Tunnel because it routes traffic through Cloudflare's servers, so my home IP stays hidden rather than being exposed publicly.</p> <p>One issue I ran into was fourpointo going down every time I closed the lid of my server. Then I realised the server cannot go to sleep, even if the lid is closed. So I edited a systemd script using the Command Line Interface to set it so that it doesn't go to sleep when the lid is closed.</p> <p>Another issue I faced was fixing bugs and pushing updates remotely. In order to update fourpointo, I needed to SSH into the server. However, that only worked if I was on the same wifi as my server. So remote fixing was impossible. To solve this issue, I used Tailscale which acts as a bridge between my server and my laptop. Tailscale generated an IP for me to use when I want to SSH into the server remotely.</p> <p>Through this experience, I learnt the basics of server and network administration using Linux. I will continue to push updates to fourpointo to enhance users' experiences and hopefully in the future, I will be able to scale the app up.</p> python webdev linux beginners