Most side projects start the same way. You grab a VPS from Hetzner or DigitalOcean, install Docker, run docker compose up, and boom – you're live.

It feels cheap. It feels simple. Until it isn't.

When you talk to enough developers about how they deploy projects, a few patterns start to emerge. Some are obvious in hindsight, others caught me completely off guard.

Here are my biggest takeaways so far.

You've got a working docker-compose.yml, and now you want to put it online.

Maybe it's a SaaS side project. A personal site. A dashboard for a client. Whatever it is – you're here because you want to host a Compose app, and you don't want to spend hours fiddling with YAML, CI pipelines, or Kubernetes manifests.

Let's walk through what it really takes to host a Docker Compose project on your own. And then I'll show you what I built to make this process go away – for myself and anyone else who's tired of copy-pasting configs.

These days, hosting your app often means choosing between complexity, lock-in, and sky-high pricing. Whether it's a shiny new platform or a slick developer tool, most of them are just wrappers around the same old giants: AWS, GCP, and Azure.

And those giants are expensive by design.