Harshit Luthra

Posted on May 18 • Edited on May 24 • Originally published at harshit.cloud

When Netlify killed my free tier: a 15-minute migration to Dokploy

#devops #hosting #costoptimization #selfhosting

Originally published at harshit.cloud on 2025-10-24.

Late night. Got this email: "[Netlify] Your projects have been suspended due to credit limit exceeded."

Five sites down:

Netlify moved legacy free tier users to their new 300-credit plan. I burned through it in a week.

New option: $9/month for 1000 credits, or figure something else out.

I had 15 minutes before my girlfriend woke up. Here's what happened.

the €3 solution

Hetzner CX22: 2 vCPUs, 4GB RAM, 40GB SSD. €3.29/month.

Math was simple:

I'd been watching this Dokploy video the week before. Perfect timing.

Minutes 0-5: Spun up Hetzner in Helsinki. Got the IP. Updated DNS.

Minutes 5-8: SSH'd in, ran the Dokploy installer:

curl -sSL https://dokploy.com/install.sh | sh

One command. Dokploy installed Docker, Traefik, PostgreSQL, everything.

Minutes 8-12: Connected Git repos. Paste GitHub URL, select branch, done.

Minutes 12-15: Hit deploy on all 5 projects. Watched them come back to life.

The Fiance woke up. dilharia.love was live.

SSL just works. Traefik + Let's Encrypt provision certificates automatically. I'm running Cloudflare Full (Strict) mode - zero warnings.

WWW redirects? One checkbox. Netlify charged extra for this.

Logs and monitoring built-in. No Datadog bill. No "$500/month observability platform."

You own the ops. Server goes down? That's on you. No 99.9% SLA.

You handle security: OS updates, SSH keys, backups. I run apt upgrade weekly and backup to Backblaze B2 for $0.50/month.

For personal projects? Worth it. For business-critical stuff? Pay for managed services.

Server load: 8% CPU. Zero downtime. SSL renewals automatic.

All 5 sites running smoothly: linkedintel.ai pulling data, sachin.cool looking sharp, dilharia.love collecting RSVPs.

Deployed 3 more projects since then. No credit anxiety. No surprise bills.

Total maintenance time: 10 minutes/week.

Best infrastructure decision I've made this year.