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.