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Moving my whole cloud infrastructure to Coolify

For years my side projects lived across a scattered set of managed platforms. Every month the bills crept up and every deploy felt slightly different. So I moved the whole lot onto a single VPS running Coolify.

The migration

Coolify is essentially a self-hosted Heroku — push to a repo, it builds and deploys. Getting there meant:

  1. Provisioning a modest VPS and locking down SSH.
  2. Pointing DNS at the new box and letting Coolify handle TLS.
  3. Re-creating each service as a Coolify application or Docker Compose stack.

What broke

The databases were the scary part. Migrating persistent volumes without downtime took two attempts and one very late night. My advice: rehearse the restore, not just the backup.

Was it worth it?

Absolutely. One dashboard, one bill, and deploys that finally feel the same everywhere. The trade-off is that I am now the on-call engineer — but for a personal setup, that is a price I am happy to pay.