Prerequisites and Choices
Before standing up your self-hosted dev platform you need to decide where it will run and gather a few foundational tools on your local machine.
What this page covers
- Bare metal vs. VPS: trade-offs and recommended providers
- Minimum local tooling (SSH client, git, a terminal)
- Account setup: domain registrar, DNS provider, cloud provider (if using VPS)
- Overview of what the guide will build
Bare metal vs. VPS
Running on bare metal gives you maximum control and no monthly compute cost beyond electricity, but requires physical hardware and home networking considerations (static IP or DDNS, port forwarding, power reliability).
A VPS from Linode (Akamai Cloud), Hetzner, or DigitalOcean gives you a clean Ubuntu Server image, a public IP, and hourly billing. It is the fastest path to a working system and is the primary context assumed by this guide.
Recommended providers
- Linode / Akamai Cloud — reliable, straightforward pricing, good documentation
- Hetzner — excellent price-to-performance ratio, especially in Europe
- DigitalOcean — beginner-friendly, strong managed offerings