17 posts tagged with "devops"

Short answer first: use Supabase if you want Postgres plus auth, realtime, storage, and a dashboard as one managed bundle. Self-host Postgres – or use a managed Postgres – if you mostly need a database and your app already handles its own auth and logic. The choice is not really "Postgres vs Supabase". It's whether you need the extra layers Supabase puts on top of Postgres.

This post gives you a clear way to decide, a side-by-side table, and the cases where each option is the right one.

Usage-based pricing always looks cheap on the signup page. "Pay only for what you use." "Starts at $5." Then a few months in, your bill is double what you guessed, and you can't really point at the one thing that did it.

I've been comparing platforms a lot lately – partly because I run one, partly because people keep emailing me to ask whether X or Y is cheaper than Hostim. So here's the actual math on why metered hosting drifts upward over time, and the honest version of when it's the better deal anyway.

If you run Kubernetes and want a wildcard TLS cert from Let's Encrypt — say *.example.com — you need a DNS-01 challenge. HTTP-01 cannot prove control over a wildcard. That single fact rules out the easy path most tutorials show.

This post is what we actually run at Hostim.dev for our shared *.region.hostim.dev wildcard. We use cert-manager for per-app certs and a plain certbot Ansible playbook for the wildcard. Two different tools for two different jobs. We will explain why, then show the code for both.

Most small teams hit the same question at some point: should we move to Kubernetes? The honest answer for the majority of them is no, but that answer alone is not very helpful. So here is the longer version, with real prices and a clear line where the answer flips to yes.

When you're deploying your own app, the database choice matters more than most people think. It affects performance, ops complexity, backups, and how much memory your server needs.

There are four options you'll run into most often: SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Redis. They're not all the same kind of database – and that's the point. Here's when each one makes sense.

Heroku just said it's moving to a "sustaining engineering" model.

That's corporate speak for:

• No big new features
• Focus on stability and security
• No new enterprise contracts
• Maintain what exists

Heroku isn't shutting down.

But it's not a growth product anymore.

Umami is great. Lightweight, privacy-friendly, no cookies, no tracking drama. We use it ourselves on Hostim.dev, and we ship a one-click Umami template for anyone who wants simple, privacy-focused analytics.

But once you start relying on analytics to make actual decisions, you hit the limits pretty quickly.

When running Kubernetes on Hetzner Dedicated, there is no cloud load balancer. But you can provide public LoadBalancer IPs by attaching a routed IP range to a vSwitch and letting MetalLB announce addresses over L2.

Our setup:

• Calico (VXLAN + WireGuard)
• kube-proxy IPVS with strictARP
• ingress-nginx for ingress traffic

n8n is a popular open-source automation tool – like Zapier, but self-hosted. Here's how to run it on your own VPS using Docker Compose, and expose it securely over HTTPS using Caddy as the ingress proxy.

If you want a broader primer, check out How to Self-Host a Docker Compose App. But you don't need to read it first – this guide is self-contained.

🗓️ Last updated: May 2026. Tested with the latest n8nio/n8n image on Ubuntu 24.04.

Reverse proxies are the unsung heroes of modern infrastructure. They terminate TLS, route traffic, balance loads, and keep your apps reachable. But which one should you choose? There are four popular options worth comparing head-to-head: Nginx, HAProxy, Caddy, and Traefik. Each comes with its own strengths, trade-offs, and ideal use cases.