Self-Host Your App: The Complete Guide
Move your app onto a server you rent for a fixed price, keep the push to deploy workflow you already have, and stop paying a meter that moves with your traffic.
What you will learn
- Read a platform bill properly, and see which of five meters actually caused it
- Buy and connect to a server, and size it honestly for what you run
- Install Coolify so push to GitHub still means build, deploy and HTTPS
- Run your own Postgres, without connection limits sold back to you
- Secure a server: no root, keys instead of passwords, a firewall and two factor
- Add Redis, S3 compatible storage with MinIO, and send email without being marked as spam
- Understand Docker when you actually need it, and run several apps on one machine
- Take backups, get them off the server, and restore one before you have to
- Monitor properly, so you know before your users tell you
- Add a second server when one is not enough, and avoid the four common mistakes
- Deploy the whole thing with Claude Code in seven prompts, and know the lines not to cross
Curriculum
- What You Are Building, and What It Costs
- What Vercel and Supabase Actually Cost
- Four Problems Money Does Not Solve
- What Professional Actually Means Here
- What a Server Costs, and How Big Yours Needs to Be
Requirements
- An app you have already deployed somewhere. This is much less useful in the abstract
- Comfort in a terminal. You will not be editing nginx configs by hand
- A card for the server, a few dollars a month, plus a domain
- No Docker experience. It is explained when you need it, not before
About this course
There is a moment most developers have once. The bill arrives and it is not the number you expected. Sometimes a crawler found a page and hit it millions of times. Sometimes nothing went wrong at all, the app simply worked and the meter kept running.
This course removes the meter. You move onto a server with a fixed monthly price and keep the workflow you already have, using Coolify to turn a bare Linux box into something that behaves like the platform you are leaving.
It is not an argument that platforms are a scam. Their pricing is usage based, which is excellent at small scale and unpredictable at real scale, and this is about choosing the other trade with your eyes open.
That trade includes responsibility, which is why security, backups and monitoring are full modules rather than footnotes. You will restore a backup rather than only taking one, and you will secure the server in the same sitting you create it, because an unsecured live server is already being scanned.
By the end you run Postgres, Redis, file storage and email on hardware you already pay for, with several apps on one machine, tested backups, and a bill that does not care whether you had ten visitors or a hundred thousand.
Who this course is for
- Anyone whose platform bill is growing faster than their revenue
- Developers running several small projects and paying a separate fee for each
- Agencies hosting client apps, where the margin is the entire business
- People who want to understand their infrastructure rather than trust a dashboard
Stop shipping demos.
This class comes with the rest of the library, every future class, and the same architecture I ship to paying clients. Start with 14 days free, then one payment. Never a subscription.