If you have ever hit the wall on a hosted registry's free private tier a 500 MB cap here, a per-seat charge there and you already run your own servers, there is a question worth asking: why not host the registry yourself?
The registry software is not the scary part. registry:2 is the CNCF Distribution project, the same reference implementation that sits underneath most managed registries. Harbor wraps it. Several big managed registries are built on it. It is boring, battle-tested, and idles at well under 50 MB of RAM.
What separates a hobby setup from a production one is everything around the binary: durable storage, TLS, authentication on both push and pull, garbage collection, and not leaving a naked port open to the internet. This article walks through a setup that gets all of that right, end to end, on a single droplet, with copy-paste commands you can follow start to finish.
By the end you will have:
A private registry running behind HTTPS on your own subdomain
