The story of DevOps tooling in 2026 is simple: the self-hosted stack has caught up to -- and in some cases surpassed -- the managed alternatives. You can run a production-grade deployment pipeline, monitoring setup, and container management layer on a single VPS. Here's what's actually worth running.
Container Management: lazydocker and Portainer
If you manage Docker containers, you need at least one of these. They solve the same problem differently.
lazydocker is a terminal UI for Docker. It shows containers, images, volumes, and networks in a keyboard-driven interface. You can tail logs, view stats, restart services, and manage Docker Compose stacks without remembering a single Docker CLI flag. If you live in the terminal and manage a handful of services, lazydocker is the right fit -- fast, zero configuration, no web browser needed.
Portainer is the web UI approach. It provides a full management dashboard for Docker, Swarm, and Kubernetes. Deploy containers, manage stacks, control access with RBAC, and monitor resources through a point-and-click interface. If you have a team managing infrastructure, or you want to give non-terminal-users access to container management, Portainer is the answer.
Pick lazydocker for solo/small team terminal workflows. Pick Portainer when multiple people need container access.
Deployment: Coolify is the Real Deal
Coolify has quietly become one of the most important self-hosted tools of the year. It's a PaaS you run on your own servers -- think Heroku or Vercel, but on hardware you control.
Push to a Git branch, Coolify builds and deploys. It handles SSL certificates, preview deployments, database provisioning, and supports Docker, static sites, and every major framework. The UI is polished, the GitHub integration works, and the one-click service templates (PostgreSQL, Redis, MinIO) save real setup time.
If you've been paying for managed deployment platforms and wondering whether self-hosting is viable, Coolify is the answer. It's viable.
Monitoring: Uptime Kuma and Grafana
Monitoring splits into two distinct needs: "is it up?" and "how is it performing?"
Uptime Kuma handles the first question beautifully. It monitors HTTP endpoints, TCP ports, DNS, Docker containers, and more. The notification integrations cover everything -- Slack, Discord, Telegram, email, and 90+ other services. The status pages are clean enough to share publicly. Setup takes five minutes.
Grafana handles the deeper observability story. Connect it to Prometheus for metrics, Loki for logs, or any of dozens of other data sources. The dashboards are flexible enough to visualize anything, and the alerting system is mature. If you need to understand performance trends, capacity planning, or debug production issues, Grafana is the standard for good reason.
For smaller setups, Beszel is worth a look -- a lightweight server monitoring hub with historical data and Docker stats that fills the gap between Uptime Kuma's simplicity and Grafana's complexity.
Web Server: Caddy Simplifies Everything
Caddy has made Nginx feel unnecessarily complicated. Automatic HTTPS with certificate provisioning and renewal, a human-readable config format, reverse proxying, load balancing, and static file serving -- all out of the box.
A typical Caddyfile is three lines long. A typical Nginx config for the same setup is thirty. Caddy handles Let's Encrypt certificates automatically, which alone removes an entire class of maintenance headaches. For new deployments, there's no reason to reach for Nginx unless you have very specific performance tuning needs.
Git Hosting: Gitea
Gitea gives you GitHub-like functionality on your own server: repositories, issues, pull requests, CI/CD (via Gitea Actions), package registries, and project boards. It runs on minimal hardware and is genuinely easy to install.
The reason to self-host Git isn't paranoia -- it's latency and control. Private repos with instant clone speeds, CI runners on your own hardware, and no dependency on GitHub's availability. For teams that value sovereignty over convenience, Gitea delivers.
Object Storage: MinIO
MinIO is a high-performance, S3-compatible object storage system that acts as a drop-in replacement for Amazon S3. The API compatibility is thorough enough that most S3 SDKs work without modification. Run it on bare metal, Docker, or Kubernetes.
If you're self-hosting other services, MinIO gives you a unified storage layer. Coolify uses it for build artifacts, Gitea for LFS, Grafana for dashboard snapshots. Having local S3-compatible storage simplifies the entire stack.
The Self-Hosted DevOps Stack
Here's the stack that actually works in production:
- Deploy: Coolify for application deployment
- Containers: lazydocker or Portainer for management
- Monitor: Uptime Kuma for availability, Grafana for observability
- Web server: Caddy for reverse proxy and TLS
- Git: Gitea for source hosting
- Storage: MinIO for S3-compatible object storage
The total cost is whatever your VPS costs. The capability matches or exceeds what you'd pay hundreds per month for in managed services.
Explore all tools in our DevOps & Infrastructure category, or search for something specific.