Self-hosted PaaS
Running your own deploy platform: what Coolify, Dokku, CapRover and Dokploy actually solve, where a single box stops being enough, and what a git-push workflow has to get right.
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- The Self-Hosted PaaS Category Gets Crowded in 2026: What Coolify, Dokku, CapRover, and Dokploy Actually Don't DoCoolify, Dokku, CapRover, and Dokploy now cover the self-hosted PaaS category from every angle. A grounded look at the three things none of them do — and the real cost of the Kubernetes-native alternative that does.
- Coolify v4 and the v5 Rewrite: What 325,000 Users on a Single-Box PaaS Say About Multi-Server ScalabilityCoolify v4 polished the single-box self-hosted PaaS to a shine — then announced v5 as a ground-up rewrite for multi-server scalability. A mechanism-by-mechanism look at why fleet behavior can't be bolted onto per-host SSH orchestration, and what a Kubernetes/Cluster API platform inherits on day one.
- Coolify, Dokku, and CapRover Solve Git-Push Deploys on One Box — Here's Exactly Where That Wall IsCoolify, Dokku, and CapRover all run one Docker daemon as the control plane, build runner, and runtime. Here are the actual RAM, CPU-during-deploy, and reboot-failure numbers that mark where that single box stops working, and what a Cluster API fleet does differently.
- What a Git-Push PaaS Should Actually Clone: Shallow vs Partial Clones and What Checkout Time Adds to Every BuildShallow clones are 4-6x faster and the industry default, but they break versioning tools and make every later fetch 25x more expensive. Benchmarks, real PaaS defaults from Render to Heroku, and the break-even point where blobless partial clones win.
- The Entrypoint You Didn't Write: Buildpacks Is Moving Its 2.9 MB Launcher Into the Run Image and Rewriting It in RustEvery buildpack-built image runs a 2.9 MB Go binary you never chose, and it is why your scanner is red. Two open CNB RFCs would move it into the run image and rewrite it in Rust — here is what each one actually fixes, and what it does not.
- CNCF's Platform Engineering 2.0 Five Pillars: Grading a Self-Hosted PaaS Against the AI-Era ScorecardCNCF's July 2026 Platform Engineering 2.0 framework sets five AI-era pillars. We grade a Cluster-API-managed, Render-compatible self-hosted PaaS against each one — one pass, two partials, two gaps — and map the honest upgrade path.
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