Beginner Guide to VPS Hetzner and Coolify

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Article Reception & Style

  • Many readers found the guide very helpful, especially for beginners, and praised it as clear and well structured.
  • Several people were disappointed that Coolify is barely covered despite being in the title; some felt the article should be retitled or extended with an actual Coolify walkthrough.
  • A few criticized the writing as “LLM-like” and said that ChatGPT-style prose undermines trust, even if the technical content is sound.
  • UI complaints: excessive padding in code blocks and heavy frontend resource use made the page unpleasant or CPU‑intensive for some.

Hetzner: Value, Reliability, and Friction

  • Hetzner is widely praised for low prices, strong performance (especially newer ARM/EPYC VPS), and reliability; several run production or long‑lived setups there.
  • Downsides mentioned:
    • Region/plan quirks (older Intel plans unavailable, ARM/AMD sometimes pricier; certain SKUs only in older DCs).
    • Account/billing friction: strict ID checks, sudden account blocks, ports (like mail) disabled until after first billing cycle, and hard shutdowns when payment fails or cards are replaced. Experiences ranged from “great technical support” to “never again.”
  • Some recommend using Hetzner’s own firewall and Cloudflare in front, and designing failover to other providers.

Comparisons: OVH, Hostup, DO, etc.

  • OVH’s newer VPS offers are seen as extremely cheap, sometimes undercutting Hetzner at larger sizes; others report worse performance, odd failures, or very slow support.
  • The 2021 OVH datacenter fire is repeatedly cited as a trust issue, though some argue proper HA makes this a non‑issue.
  • Hostup is discussed as “cheaper but not by much,” with weaker networking and fewer features than Hetzner.
  • Several note that Hetzner/OVH are cheaper partly due to commodity or non‑“server‑grade” hardware, tight margins, in‑house DC design, and minimal support.

Coolify, Alternatives, and Deployment Approaches

  • Mixed sentiment on Coolify:
    • Fans like its “Heroku‑like” simplicity atop Docker+Traefik and share tutorials and prebuilt Hetzner images.
    • Critics report bugs with multi‑container setups, missing production‑grade backup/replication features, and discomfort with non‑declarative, non‑IaC state; one calls it “terrible” and recommends Dokploy instead.
  • Many argue a Docker (or Docker Compose) based setup is more repeatable than the article’s direct app deployment; others suggest CapRover, Kamal, Cloud66, Cosmos Cloud, or full infra‑as‑code (Ansible, NixOS, CDK‑like tools).

Security & Operational Practices

  • Broad agreement on:
    • Use SSH keys, disable root login, and avoid password auth; debate over changing SSH port (useful for log noise, not core security).
    • Restricting SSH by IP is risky with dynamic IPs; alternatives include VPNs or Tailscale, though one commenter objects to depending on a third‑party tunnel.
    • VPS providers must be considered able to access data; encrypt truly sensitive data client‑side and don’t treat budget VPS as suitable for highly sensitive workloads.
  • Several note missing or incomplete topics for a production‑grade setup: database backups and WAL streaming, off‑host backups, monitoring, log rotation, separation of build vs runtime, and safe Docker+firewall interaction (e.g., Docker/ufw pitfalls).
  • Some recommend caddy over nginx for beginners, and caution against running builds on the same host that serves production traffic.

Cloud vs Raw VPS Economics

  • One camp argues “cloud pricing no longer makes sense” for simple compute/bandwidth workloads; Hetzner‑style VPS plus lightweight tooling can be an order of magnitude cheaper than managed K8s on big clouds.
  • Another notes that for some companies, leaving a major cloud would increase costs 5–10x once staff time, tooling, and lost managed services are considered; cloud can still be cheaper for spiky or complex workloads.