I ditched Azure for a self-hosted VPS and cut my hosting bill by 80%
In the past 1 year it has always hurt me to see a 56 EUR hosting bill each month. Doing the math it accumulates to 672 EUR per year!
I don't know why I didn’t do the math a bit earlier though. It could have saved me those 672 EUR, but hey I never liked math anyway.
So I decided to move everything to a self-hosted VPS.
A VPS is basically a virtual server that you rent from a hosting provider. You get your own CPU, RAM, storage and operating system, but instead of paying for a managed platform like Azure App Service, you are responsible for running and managing the server yourself.
On top of the VPS I run Docker, with my frontend, backend, Dokploy, and Traefik each running in their own containers.
Traefik acts as the reverse proxy, receiving incoming traffic and routing each request to the correct container based on the domain. It also handles HTTPS certificates.
Dokploy is a self-hosted PaaS that gives me the Azure App Service experience on my own machines: push code, get a deployment. It connects to my GitHub repositories and manages deployments, domains, environment variables, logs, databases, and Docker services, all from a single dashboard.
So instead of paying Azure to manage the infrastructure for me, I rent the server directly and run the platform on top of it myself.
The result is around 80% lower hosting costs and much more control over how everything is deployed.