00:00:00You know that feeling when everything is working until the bill shows up?
00:00:04Vercel, Railway, Heroku, it's great at first and then it creeps up.
00:00:0850, 100, sometimes more.
00:00:11Now imagine keeping that same experience but running it on a $5 VPS you already own.
00:00:16This is Dockploy, and it's getting a lot of attention right now.
00:00:20I'll show you how this works in just a few minutes so you can get it running.
00:00:29So what is Dockploy? The simple version is it turns your VPS into your own Vercel or Heroku.
00:00:35Under everything it uses Docker and Trafic, but the workflow is what matters.
00:00:39You run one command, connect your GitHub, push code, and your app is live.
00:00:44You also get built-in databases, automatic backups, real-time monitoring, and Docker Compose support,
00:00:49with even Docker Swarm for scaling across servers.
00:00:52Most of us are stuck choosing between easy but expensive cloud platforms or powerful but manual Docker setups.
00:00:58Dockploy sits right in the middle.
00:01:00You keep control but lose a lot of the pain. Let me show you.
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00:01:08Alright, watch this. So I did set up a Hetzner VPS for all this.
00:01:12Now technically it can be done locally, but most of us wouldn't do that.
00:01:16I now run one command and Dockploy is up.
00:01:19You can create an account on it and then we can create a project.
00:01:22Now I connect a GitHub repo, this is just a simple Next.js app, hit deploy, that's it.
00:01:28Once it's all deployed, I will drop in a local domain and then open it in my browser.
00:01:33The app is live with HTTPS already working.
00:01:36Logs are here, metrics are here, rollback in one click.
00:01:40That whole process took less than 30 seconds.
00:01:43I can go make a minor change to the code, push the code, then redeploy just to showcase this,
00:01:49and you can see we're still connected and good to go.
00:01:52And this is where it gets really interesting because once you see this working, it gets really hard to justify the old setup.
00:01:59So really this is why this is landing with so many devs.
00:02:02Now cloud platform as a service is convenient until the build shows up.
00:02:06Roll Docker gives you freedom until you're wiring everything together yourself, so Dockploy hits the sweet spot.
00:02:12Compared to Vercel or Railway, there are no usage fees and you can run more than just static or serverless apps.
00:02:19Compared to Coolify, Dockploy feels lighter, the UI is cleaner, and Docker Swarm is built in if you want real multi-server scaling.
00:02:26The biggest thing is it's Docker native, so you're not rewriting your stack, you're just deploying what you already have.
00:02:32Okay, now a few nice things here.
00:02:34First, okay, is speed.
00:02:36A lot of people say these are some of the fastest deploys they've ever seen, especially incremental ones.
00:02:41Then I really did love the UI, which is rare for a self-hosted tool.
00:02:46The scaling with Swarm is much simpler than I expected.
00:02:49And finally, built-in backups and monitoring mean you don't need a bunch of extra tools.
00:02:53That's why people feel comfortable running this in production.
00:02:56Now to be fair, it's not perfect. It's a newer project, so there are fewer docks.
00:03:00There have been some volume-mount quirks here and there, and there's a mix of open source and paid features.
00:03:05But the core is fully free.
00:03:08Overall, the downsides are small because we can still get a ton of core features we actually want, or should I say, need.
00:03:14So is it worth using? Dockploy is really cool.
00:03:17I mean, so yeah, if you're a solo dev, a small team, or just tired of cloud bills getting out of control, this does solve a real problem.
00:03:24You get production-grade deploys without turning into a DevOps engineer.
00:03:28It works with Next.js, Python, APIs, and full multi-service stacks.
00:03:33Now skip through it if you want a massive ecosystem of templates, or you don't want to deal with self-hosting at all.
00:03:40But for most devs, this is a really smart middle ground.
00:03:43We keep the simplicity of cloud platforms while running on infrastructure we can actually control a bit more, right?
00:03:49So that's the whole idea.
00:03:50Dockploy gives you Vercel-style simplicity on your own hardware with lower cost, more control without that lock-in.
00:03:57If that sounds good, give it a try. Grab a cheap VPS.
00:04:00I ran Hetzner. They did increase their prices, so it was a bit more.
00:04:03But just see how it feels.
00:04:04I've linked some docs and info below to help you get started.
00:04:07If you enjoy coding tools and tips like this to speed up your workflow, be sure to subscribe to the Better Stack channel.
00:04:12We'll see you in another video!