Over the past year, I’ve built out a self-hosting setup that handles everything from finance tracking to server monitoring. Here’s what I’m running and why I chose each tool.
Table of Contents
Open Table of Contents
Coolify
A good way to manage self-hosted tools. Recently they’ve made a direct integration with Hetzner, so now Hetzner servers can be provisioned, deployed, and managed right in the Coolify UI.
I spent some hours battling with their reverse proxy, but otherwise it’s been a good experience using this tool.
Everything is backed up locally and with Cloudflare R2.
N8n
For automation and building agents. That’s the tool you’ve probably heard about.
Actual
With this tool, I manage my finances better than I have in decades.
They use envelope budgeting (https://actualbudget.org/docs/getting-started/envelope-budgeting), which I became a fan of. One side effect of long-term use of this tool is that I now get joy and excitement about saving money.
Postiz
A tool for social media posting. I have LinkedIn and Threads connected (plan to connect Instagram). It also automatically fetches RSS from my blog.
Not active there yet, but plan to be!
Kuma to monitor uptime
Easy, simple, and fun. Just ping my servers from there and have alerts configured for Telegram.
Beszel for server monitoring
This is the tool I use to monitor my servers (currently have two) and containers. Love its simplicity and nice dashboards.
Umami for analytics
Simple design, open-source. GA4 is an abomination, especially for small projects, so this is a great minimalistic and effective tool.
They also have an API, so I configured weekly reports to my Telegram.
In my opinion, Umami is a good choice for blogs and content-focused sites. For a product, you might consider a tool like PostHog (I wrote about it in another blog post: https://www.venger.me/posts/posthog-vs-clarity-and-hotjar).
Telegram for real-time alerts
I use it to receive alerts if servers or apps are down. Also for small dopamine boosts I get from every like on my blog posts.
Namecheap and Porkbun for domain management
Simple and reliable domain registrars.
I manage all of this using two Hetzner servers: one for Coolify, and another for everything else. This set up (including backups) costs me about $20.