Forget the Big Cloud: Learn how to self-host your products in a single £3.63/mo VPS
This is 5-hour workshop for technical founders or software developers considering getting into entreprenership without burning all their money. The workshop will cover a practical introduction to running your own infrastructure without relying on AWS, GCP, or Azure. The focus is on deploying real projects on a single low-cost VPS and understanding exactly what is running, where, and why.
You will start from a blank VPS and set it up using the most traditional approach: installing your application directly on the server and running it as a systemd service. This shows how things were (and still are) done in the simplest possible way.
From there, the workshop progressively increases in sophistication. You will add more projects to the same server and reach the point where manual service management stops scaling. At that stage, we will move to containers, introduce a reverse proxy, and learn how to host multiple services behind a single IP with proper routing and HTTPS.
Finally, the workshop shows how the same setup can evolve into a small Kubernetes cluster, and what problems Kubernetes actually solves compared to the simpler approaches. The goal is not to jump to Kubernetes immediately, but to understand why and when it becomes justified.
By the end, you will understand how to:
Rent and initialize a VPS
Deploy an application as a systemd service
Run multiple projects on one machine and manage them sanely
Move those projects to containers
Add a reverse proxy and HTTPS
Understand the real trade-offs of introducing Kubernetes
This is not a theoretical cloud architecture talk. It is a step-by-step, totally practical hands-on progression from “one binary on one server” to a more structured setup, all on a cheap VPS that you fully control.
Agenda for Saturday
Creating your own Heztner VPS and securing it with a firewall
Private/public SSH keys concepts to access the VPS
Vibecode small app in whatever language you are familiar with
Naive deployment
Add records to DNS. Buying domains. NameServers and Cloudflare benefits
Where Naive deployment fails
Using systemd
Using reverse proxies and why (Caddy, Nginx)
Add a replica of the original app to see the round robin approach
Workers vs Replicas
Enter Docker. Why do we need to use it
Using Docker for Deployment
Replacing the reverse proxy for a reverse proxy in a container
And more...
FAQ
Why don't you teach me the final way of doing things? Straight to Kubernetes!
Fair question. Is our philosophy that there's a lot of cargo cult in the software industry. The Big Cloud marketing has convinced most developers that the cloud is the first option when starting to deploy your products. Far from the truth, we want to show you how you can run things as simple as possible and, how when complexity increases, you can start adding more abstract layers
Why don't use third-party services like Netlify, Vercel, etc?
Yes, you definitely can. We are not against. However, our purpose for this workshop is to show you how you can be independent of third-party services and control your own infrastructure.
35 is too expensive!
The knowledge that you will gain on this workshop will give you about 7 months of infrastructure compared to using the Big Cloud instances
Join the WhatsApp group at https://ai201.club/whatsapp