2 min read

Ditching Azure For Hetzner

There comes a time in every tech tinkerer’s life when you look at your cloud hosting invoice and think, “Why am I paying enterprise prices to host what is essentially a digital garage?”

So, I did what any reasonable enthusiast would do: I packed my digital bags, dumped Azure, and took a grand tour back to good old self-hosting on a Hetzner VPS. Here is a peek under the hood of my shiny new setup and why I couldn't be happier.

1. The Land of Cheap, Fast Iron: Hetzner VPS

Let’s be honest for a second. Azure is amazing if you’re a Fortune 500 company or enjoy spending three hours navigating enterprise identity management just to launch a virtual machine. But for me? Overkill is an understatement.

Enter Hetzner. For a fraction of the price of big cloud providers, I get screamingly fast performance on a dedicated VPS. It turns out that owning your own little corner of the server world feels remarkably freeing (and your wallet will definitely thank you).

2. Finding the CMS Sweet Spot: Ghost

My journey with blogging platforms has been a bit of a Goldilocks story:

  • WordPress: Silly to use, cluttered, and frankly not very nice to interact with anymore.
  • Hugo: Super fast, and to give credit where it's due, the themes are unmatched! But at the end of the day, maintaining a static site generator required just a bit too much friction for quick thoughts.
  • Ghost: Just right.

Switching to Ghost was a breath of fresh air. It makes managing the site and hosting content insanely simple, letting me focus on actually writing rather than wrestling with configurations or endless plugin updates.

3. Coolify: My New Secret Weapon

If you take only one thing away from this post, let it be this: Coolify is pure magic.

Seriously, since I started using Coolify, I can’t imagine managing my server any other way. It gives you that effortless "Heroku-style" experience right on your own VPS.

  • One-click deployments for popular services? Check.
  • Seamless automatic deployments directly from GitHub? Check.
  • An easy, clean dashboard to manage my whole server without losing my mind in terminal tabs? Double check.

4. Immich: De-Googling My Memories

Why let tech giants scrape your vacation photos when you can host your own privacy-first cloud?

I’m using Immich for photo management and automated phone backups. It’s essentially a self-hosted Google Photos clone that works shockingly well. The mobile app syncs smoothly in the background, the UI is slick, and best of all: my personal memories stay on my server.

5. Navidrome: Bringing Back the MP3 Renaissance

streaming services keep raising prices while removing albums overnight, I decided to go retro-futuristic: actually buying my music again.

I use Navidrome to stream my personal music library across all my devices. I buy my favorite albums in MP3/FLAC format, slap them on the server, and stream them wherever I am. No algorithms telling me what to listen to, no disappearing tracks—just pure, owned music.

The Verdict

Moving away from bloated cloud providers to a clean, self-hosted Hetzner setup managed by Coolify has been one of the best tech decisions I've made recently. It’s faster, cheaper, and infinitely more satisfying.

Have questions about any of these self-hosted tools? Reach out on my site or send a message—I'm always down to talk homelab setups!