The fleet — 12 servers, 25+ apps
A personal mini-cloud of 12 servers at two providers — automated deployments, round-the-clock monitoring and encrypted nightly backups, for under €25 a month.
How it started
With one server for one project. Then the project became two, then five, and the server started wheezing. Instead of paying for managed services, I decided to learn how to do everything myself — and step by step, the fleet appeared: three paid machines plus nine free ARM boxes from Oracle’s generous free tier, all wired into one private network.
How it works
Every app lives in a Docker container managed by Coolify — a self-hosted alternative to Vercel/Heroku. Push code to GitHub, a webhook catches it, builds it and deploys it automatically. Traefik hands out HTTPS certificates on its own, and Tailscale keeps the machines on a shared private network so databases never face the public internet.
Monitoring runs at three levels: uptime probes on every public URL, live logs from every container, and system metrics on every machine. When something goes down — and something always goes down — I usually know before anyone else notices.
What broke along the way
Everything, at one point or another. A disk hitting 100% in the middle of the night. Zombie processes multiplying into the thousands. A server freezing while pretending to be healthy. Every incident ends the same way: automation that makes a repeat impossible. Backups are tested with real restores, not with hope.
Why I love it
Because it’s real. There is no better teacher than a production system you alone are responsible for — from the DNS record to the last line of the backup script. And because the whole game costs less per month than one dinner out in Sofia.