Self-Hosting Business Software

Self-hosting stopped being a hobbyist argument the moment a decent VPS cost less than a single SaaS seat. A Hetzner CX22 runs about 4 euros a month and will comfortably hold a CRM for a ten-person team, a couple of analytics databases, and a file sync service. Compare that to five seats of a mainstream CRM at 25 dollars each and the arithmetic is not close.

The honest version of the argument is that self-hosting trades a monthly card charge for a small amount of operator attention. You need a server, a deploy path you understand, and a backup you have actually restored once. That is the whole cost. It is not zero, and any guide that pretends otherwise is selling something.

Everything below is written from machines we run ourselves. The cost comparisons quote the providers' published prices, the deployment walkthroughs use Coolify on Hetzner because that is the stack we operate, and the failure notes are things that broke on our own boxes rather than hypothetical warnings. Where a tool needs someone to babysit it, we say so.