Coolify Hosting on Your Own VPS, Pre-Installed

Coolify is an open-source platform that turns a server into your own Heroku- or Vercel-style deployment system. You connect a Git repository, Coolify builds it (from a Dockerfile, a Docker Compose file or an auto-detected buildpack), runs it in containers and puts it on a domain with a Let's Encrypt certificate. It also runs databases and a catalogue of ready-made services with a few clicks.

On Devoster you choose Coolify and a plan, pay, and we build the VPS (KVM, NVMe, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS) and install Coolify with its own installer, pinned to a version we have checked (currently Coolify 4.5.2). About six minutes after boot you have:

• The Coolify dashboard on HTTPS at an address like yourname-x7k2.devoster.app.
• Your root user already created with your Devoster account email and a generated password you can reveal in the Devoster dashboard. Coolify's registration page is closed before the dashboard is reachable, so nobody else can register as the owner of your server.
• Managed Coolify updates, tested by us and applied in a nightly window you choose (or with Update now), with a VPS snapshot taken first and an automatic rollback if Coolify does not come back healthy. Auto-update can be turned off.

Coolify is free and so is the install; you pay for the VPS plan, with 10% off yearly. More apps that install this way are on the One-Click Apps page.

Hosted platforms such as Vercel, Netlify, Render or Heroku price by seats, usage, build minutes or per-service instances, and the bill moves as projects and traffic grow. With Coolify on a VPS the price is the plan: ten small apps and their databases cost the same as one, until you need a bigger server.

What you give up is just as real, and worth saying plainly:

• One server, one region. Your apps run on a single VPS in Utah, USA. There is no global CDN or serverless scaling built in; put a CDN in front if your visitors are worldwide.
• You run the server. We manage Coolify's installation and updates. The VPS itself is unmanaged: what you deploy, your databases' backups and the security of your apps are your responsibility, and we don't support using Coolify itself.
• Builds happen on your server. A next build or a large dependency install uses the same CPU and RAM your running apps use.

For a framework-by-framework view of those trade-offs, see our guide to Next.js hosting options.

Coolify's installation guide asks for at least 2 CPU cores, 2 GB of RAM and 10 GB of free disk, plus room for your images, volumes and backups. Coolify's own services (its dashboard, database, cache, real-time server and proxy) take a share of the RAM before your first app, and builds are the biggest spikes.

Two habits keep a smaller plan workable: build images in CI and let Coolify deploy the pre-built image, and keep Coolify's Docker cleanup turned on so old images and build cache don't fill the disk. You can move to a larger plan from the panel later.

Coolify brings its own Traefik proxy and holds ports 80 and 443, so this VPS is dedicated to Coolify: everything public on it should be deployed through Coolify rather than installed beside it.

• The Coolify dashboard starts on its devoster.app address. To use your own, such as coolify.example.com, add it in the Devoster dashboard with a CNAME to the devoster.app name (recommended) or an A record to the server IP; the panel verifies DNS and the certificate is issued automatically.
• Your apps get their domains inside Coolify. Point each domain's A record at the server's dedicated IPv4 (or set a wildcard record once), enter the domain on the app, and Coolify's proxy requests the certificate when you deploy.

Email: outbound mail ports are blocked by default on Devoster VPS plans. Coolify's own notification emails, and any app you deploy that sends mail, need an external email provider; its SMTP submission port can be opened on request. Coolify's Discord, Telegram and Slack notifications work without it.

Coolify releases often, and an upgrade touches its own database and proxy. We test each version before offering it and apply it in the maintenance window you choose. A snapshot of the whole VPS is taken first; if Coolify doesn't come back healthy, the server is rolled back to that snapshot automatically. Because your apps live on the same VPS, a rollback returns them to that moment too, which is why updates run in a quiet nightly window. You can turn auto-update off and press Update now when it suits you.

For your data, layer the backups:

• Whole server: Devoster's free nightly backups (last 3 days) and one snapshot slot you control.
• Databases: Coolify can run scheduled database backups and send them to S3-compatible storage. Set this up for every database you care about, off the server.
• Code: it already lives in Git, which is the point of the workflow.

Before you open apps to the internet, go through our VPS hardening checklist; SSH and the server's OS are still yours to look after.

• You want a server you configure by hand. Coolify owns ports 80 and 443 and expects to manage the containers. If you would rather run plain Compose files with a web UI, the Docker + Portainer VPS fits better.
• Your site is one WordPress install. Managed web hosting is simpler and cheaper for that.
• You need high availability. A single VPS is a single point of failure. Coolify can manage additional servers over SSH, but spreading apps across machines is your design work.
• Nobody on the team wants to own a server. A hosted PaaS costs more, and it is the honest choice if that ownership will not happen.