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by mmarian·2y ago·view on hn ↗
I use only Astro for websites / blog sites, and host with Cloudflare Pages.

For web apps, I still use Astro/Cloudflare for the frontend. For the backend, I use Django Ninja, hosted as one of the many services I run on a Hetzner instance using CapRover.

1 comments
Recently learned bout CapRover... Curious if you would ever consider the "bare VPS" route after having used it or if it (or something like it) has become essential.
CapRover is very interesting... I actually just use Linode + Treafik + Portainer and self host all my own stuff using Docker Compose. If I have a new app, I just use GitHub Actions to build and push a container to GitHub Packages (GHCR) and then on my server I create a docker-compose.yaml and I fire it up, the labels link it all up to Traefik.

Obviously deploying is manual right now since I have to SSH in and then pull and `docker compose up -d` but I could probably find something to bridge that gap.

Id be interested in seeing how CapRover can simplify all that for me...

I just deploy straight from my machine with a single command "caprover deploy". No container registry involved.
So I spun up a Linode, installed CapRover, bought ultra cheap DNS from NameCheap using their guide to get cheap domain name and did a few deploys. Its really cool. Much easier than my approach.
You'll end up wanting to self-host everything in no time :) I've switched from Namecheap to Cloudflare because it's cheaper, and it's very easy to integrate with Google Search Console and Cloudflare Pages.
What are the reasons you use both a self-hosted VPS running CapRover and Cloudflare Pages?
Because VPS is cheaper than any managed service offering out there when you start to add up the features. For example Azure App Services can host: .NET, PHP, Python, and Node WITHOUT a container, but the second you want a custom DNS name its incredibly expensive.

A $5 VPS + CapRover instantly gives you your own app host + CICD server which you fully own, none of your data is owned by AWS or Azure either.

Most people dont self host because they dont want to worry about updating the OS and Database servers and clustering and HA/DR. Which is far. But for the average dude like me spinning up fun side projects and random stuff, why wouldn't I self-host it for next to nothing?

I tend to separate my frontend (Cloudflare Pages) from my backend (VPS/CapRover).
While looking for similar projects I also learned about https://coolify.io/ (from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCIfWhAheVw).

Coming from Netlify/Vercel/etc this seems like it could be a better option.

No, I wouldn't consider. It's so much easier to Dockerize every application. And I'm running about 10 services on the single instance, so it's a lot cheaper too.
How do you prevent issues with potential traffic spikes and such (with running 10 services on a single instance) (this is probably a dumb question... most of my experience is on the frontend)?
I don't :) I've just delayed thinking about it until I have a service that actually does have that spike, which hasn't happened yet.

It looks like the CapRover devs have a solution https://caprover.com/docs/app-scaling-and-cluster.html but I haven't tested it.