The Hardware: > We’re using a single Hetzner VPS (8 vCPU, 32GB RAM, 200GB NVMe) for ~$25/month. Compared to the big cloud providers, the vertical scaling headroom here is massive for the price.
The Stack:
Orchestration: Coolify (self-hosted PaaS). It handles SSL, GitHub-triggered Red/Blue deployments, and Docker management.
Runtime: Next.js and Bun.
Database: SQLite. Having the DB as a local file on NVMe makes latency negligible and simplifies backups (it's just a file copy).
Workers: BullMQ via Redis.
Storage: Self-hosted S3-compatible storage on the same node.
The goal was to see how far we could get before needing a distributed system. So far, the performance has been excellent, and "it just works." Happy to answer any questions about the setup or the trade-offs of going single-server.