In January 2024, I had a project at school that used an API hosted by the teacher. The only issue was, the way the API was made did not match my existing project, so I forked their API and adapted it to my needs. Then, came the issue of hosting it.
Until now, all my sites were hosted on Netlify or Vercel, but they didn’t support Node.js apps, so not possible. I tried a bunch of free providers, but none were exactly what I needed.
Then, I found Cyclic.sh (and I found out they shut it down in April while writing this), and it worked flawlessly. Until it didnt. Due to a bug in my app (that I found in production), it made like 200 requests to the API every time I refreshed the landing page. And Cyclic had a hard limit of 1000 requests per month. I deleted my account and started looking for something else. Something free, that would allow me to host my extremely lightweight Express.js app.
I started looking towards VPS providers, and I quickly found out that Oracle Cloud had a “free forever” and extremely generous plan. 4 CPUs, 24 GBs of RAM and 200 GBs of storage. I created my VM, pointed my domain name to it and installed Coolify, but we’ll get back to it later. I uninstalled it because it was full of bugs, I had to click everything 4 times for it to register. Anyways, I downloaded Easypanel, a closed-source freemium server control panel. The UI was great, but it had a few problems. I couldn’t easily manually edit the labels of my Docker containers, nor have more than 3 “projects” aka groups of apps.
I stuck with it for 8 months, but a few weeks ago, I switched back to Coolify, fundamentally the same software but free, open-source, and extremely popular since February 2024, when some guy was sent a $104,000 (one hundred and four thousand dollars) bill by Netlify. The “just use a $5 VPS” community has been growing a lot since then, and I’m one of its most fervent members, except mine is free.
Anyways, Coolify, that has improved a lot since January (@heyandras you’re the goat) + Cloudflare (DDoS protection, DNS, email routing and a lot more random useful things) is basically the perfect setup for any indie developer, but also for high-traffic applications (don’t believe me? ask @levelsio), while also being almost completely free (the only thing I pay for is the domain name, and you can get a .com one for like $10 a year).
Through this “long-term” project, I learned to use Linux effectively, navigate the OS, and understand its file system. I also gained experience with Docker containerization, reverse proxys, and learned about SSL/TLS certificates, networking, protocols, security, and DevOps in general.
PS: Yeah I know the icon on the project card is the C programming language logo, but Simple Icons sadly does not include the real Coolify logo.