Push-to-deploy, automatic HTTPS, and preview environments on a $24 droplet with Dokploy, plus the four mistakes to skip on the way.
For two years, deploying was the easiest part of my week. I pushed to main, closed my laptop, and the site updated itself. I never thought about servers, which was the entire point of paying for it.
Then I opened the invoice.
$198 for the month. I read it twice, because the number did not match what I was running: a Next.js frontend with a few thousand monthly visitors, a small API moving JSON around, one Postgres database holding a couple hundred megabytes, and a nightly cron job. Four small things, and I knew that launching a fifth would push the bill up again.
Here is what is worth understanding before you decide whether any of this applies to you. You are not paying managed platforms for compute. Compute is cheap. You are paying because somebody else already set up the reverse proxy, the TLS certificates that renew themselves, and the pipeline that turns a git push into a running container. That is real work, and it was worth every cent for two years. So the question got narrower: is it still worth it, now that I know which of those features I actually use?
