A Server Called Mercury

4 days ago

The author bought a physical server named 'mercury' from Hetzner to host all his websites, partly to reduce costs but mainly as a hobby.
He reflects on his time at Heroku, emphasizing how it shaped his view that deployment is crucial and should be seamless, praising tools like Dokku for preserving that philosophy.
The server runs Dokploy, an open-source PaaS that natively supports docker-compose, allowing him to version control his infrastructure and simplify deployments.
AI (Claude) assisted in migrating six sites by automating tasks through APIs, including DNS updates and database transfers, completing the process in one evening.
Additional services were added to the server for monitoring, repository mirroring, and analytics using open-source tools like Glance, Gitea, and Umami.
The author critiques how cloud platforms often start user-friendly but gradually shift focus to profitability, contrasting them with self-hosting as a more personal and sustainable alternative.

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