Why I Switched to a VPS with Coolify for Hosting My Full Stack Apps

There are plenty of great hosting options out there — Netlify, Vercel, Railway and more. I've tried a few of them and they all have their place. But after going through a few different setups, I landed on a VPS managed with Coolify and it's been the best experience for my workflow. Here's how I got there. Where I Started I started with Netlify. It's beginner friendly, deployment is simple and it works well for frontend projects. I then tried Vercel and that was also a solid experience — great DX, fast deploys, good defaults. Both are genuinely good platforms. But as my projects grew more complex — running a frontend, a Directus instance, a database — the platform costs and constraints started to feel limiting. The Raw VPS Experiment I decided to try self-hosting on an Ubuntu VPS with Nginx as my web server and reverse proxy. Manually configuring everything — SSL, domains, process management, deployments. It was a solid learning experience and I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to und