FOR SOLO DEVELOPERS

Manage several projects on your own server.

Working alone means the DevOps budget is your evenings. The goal is not a perfect platform — it is a machine that keeps running, tells you when it is unhappy, and can be put back after a bad deploy without you reading a runbook at midnight.

Alerting on server CPU, memory and disk is available on the Business plan. Compare plans →

THE SITUATION

What tends to go wrong.

Everything is a side quest

A certificate expires, a queue worker dies quietly, the disk fills with logs. None of it is the thing you sat down to build.

A bad deploy takes the site with it

Deploying in place means the window where the site is broken is however long the build takes — and longer if the build fails halfway.

The bill is a surprise

Usage-based hosting is cheap until something gets shared, and the invoice arrives after the traffic has gone.

WHAT DEPFLOY DOES

How each of those is handled.

Several projects on one machine

Each project gets its own port, nginx site and process. A single small server can carry a marketing site, a side project and a staging copy without them interfering.

Build before switching releases

Release-based deployments build beside the current release. A build failure before switchover leaves that release selected; shared configuration, database changes and resource pressure can still affect the running application.

Certificates and cron are handled

TLS is issued and renewed per domain, cron entries and background workers are configured next to the project they belong to, and both are restarted after a deploy.

Something checks the site when you are not looking

A health check requests the URL every 60 seconds and reads the status code. A heartbeat is switched on from a scheduled job or a background worker itself, so a cron that quietly stopped running becomes a notification instead of a discovery three weeks later. Three consecutive failures is what counts as down, and both kinds of monitor are on every plan.

CPU, memory and disk against a threshold you set

Pick the threshold and a notification arrives when it trips, then another when it clears, so a disk filling up is something you are told about while there is still room. Alerting on server metrics is a Business feature; the uptime monitors are not.

Flat Depfloy subscription

Depfloy charges a flat plan. Your provider bills separately for server capacity and any metered storage or bandwidth; traffic may change those costs.

Working alone changes which problems are worth solving. The ones here are the ones that wake you up: a deploy that broke the site, a certificate nobody renewed, a disk that filled without telling anyone.

FAQ

Solo developers questions

Is one server enough? +
For most side projects and small products, comfortably. When it is not, adding a second app node behind a load balancer is a configuration change rather than a rebuild.
Do I still need to know Linux? +
Less than you would otherwise, but you keep root and a terminal, which means you can fix something the dashboard has not thought of. The automation sits on top of your access rather than replacing it.
Will I know if a nightly job quietly stops running? +
That is what a heartbeat is for. Switch it on from the scheduled job itself — nothing is added to your crontab and no package is installed — and Depfloy reads the expected period from the cron expression and allows a grace window of half of it, never shorter than 60 seconds. The job reports that it started and then how it exited, so "ran and failed" and "never ran" arrive as different notifications. One limit worth knowing before you rely on it — a job that runs at reboot has no defined window, so it cannot carry a heartbeat.
What if I break something? +
Rollback can reuse a retained PHP-FPM release. Node.js, Octane and missing releases rebuild at the selected commit. Check that shared configuration and database state are compatible with the target code; application rollback does not reverse database migrations. Scheduled database backups and restore are available from Pro.
Can I start on a cheap VPS? +
Yes. Connect any machine you can reach over SSH running Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04 or 26.04, or have Depfloy create one for you on Hetzner, AWS or DigitalOcean.

Other ways people use Depfloy

Try it on one server.

7 days free, no credit card. Connect a machine you already have.