Self-hosting on Hetzner

Almost everything I build lives on a single Hetzner machine I call pizzatipz. No Kubernetes, no managed platform, no monthly bill that quietly triples. Just Ubuntu, systemd, nginx, Docker where it earns its keep, and cron.

The setup, roughly:

• Process management via systemd units — each service restarts on failure and starts on boot. Logs go to journald.
• Reverse proxy with nginx hardening in front of everything; TLS via Let's Encrypt on a renewal timer.
• Postgres as the one stateful dependency, with PgBouncer pooling and nightly pg_dump backups on a retention policy.
• Deploys from on-box GitHub Actions runners: lint, test, build, then a symlink-swap release so rollback is instant.

Why bother when the cloud exists? Because owning the whole stack is the fastest way to actually understand it, the latency is great, and the cost is a rounding error. It's the same instinct as validate before automating — I'd rather know exactly what my system does than trust a black box to do it for me.