What most hosting actually looks like
When a business signs up for managed hosting, they are sharing a server with hundreds or thousands of other sites. Resources are pooled, performance is capped, and when something goes wrong, you are waiting on a support ticket. The convenience of managed hosting comes at the cost of control.
For small personal projects, that trade-off makes sense. For a business site that is supposed to generate leads, it usually does not. Slow hosting directly undermines the work you put into website speed and maintenance — you cannot fully control performance if the server underneath is shared and rate-limited.
How we deploy client projects
We run our own infrastructure on dedicated servers hosted by Hetzner. Each project runs in its own Docker container, deployed and managed through Coolify, which is an open-source platform we self-host alongside our applications.
This means every client site has isolated resources. One client’s traffic does not affect another. We can scale a specific service without touching anything else. And we can see exactly what is happening at the server level if something needs attention. Both our Payload CMS and Astro projects deploy through this same pipeline.
The performance difference is real
Shared hosting and some managed platforms introduce latency that is hard to eliminate because it is baked into their architecture. Time to First Byte is high, cold starts add delay, and edge caching is often limited by the plan tier.
On our infrastructure, pages are served with low latency, images are optimized and cached, and there are no artificial limits on what the server can do. For sites where Core Web Vitals matter for SEO, this is not a minor detail. It is a significant advantage.
Cost at scale
Managed platforms are inexpensive at first and expensive at scale. Serverless functions, bandwidth overages, and seat-based pricing add up quickly once a site is doing real traffic.
A dedicated server with enough capacity for multiple applications costs a fixed amount per month regardless of how many requests come in. That predictability matters for clients who are building something they expect to grow.
Customization without limits
Self-hosting means we can run anything. Custom cron jobs, background workers, webhook processors, internal tooling, database backups, staging environments. None of these require a separate service or a higher-tier plan. They run on the same infrastructure.
Transactional email is part of this stack too. We configure Resend for email delivery on every project that needs it, so form submissions and automated messages route reliably without depending on a third-party plugin or shared mail server.
