Late night. Got this email: "[Netlify] Your projects have been suspended due to credit limit exceeded."
Five sites down:
- linkedintel.ai (LinkedIn Sales Intelligence AI for SDR's)
- sachin.cool (rookie website from college time)
- dilharia.love (wedding RSVP site - yes, judge me)
- My personal blog
- A ex-ceo's landing page
Netlify moved legacy free tier users to their new 300-credit plan. I burned through it in a week.
Fig. 2 · the upgrade path Netlify wanted me to take.
New option: $9/month for 1000 credits, or figure something else out.
I had 15 minutes before my girlfriend woke up. Here's what happened.
the €3 solution
Hetzner CX22: 2 vCPUs, 4GB RAM, 40GB SSD. €3.29/month.
Fig. 3 · the box that replaced all five sites for €3.29 a month.
Math was simple:
- Netlify: $108/year for credit anxiety
- Dokploy + Hetzner: $42/year for unlimited deploys
Fig. 4 · $108 a year for credit anxiety versus $42 a year for unlimited deploys.
I'd been watching this Dokploy video the week before. Perfect timing.
the 15-minute panic deploy
Minutes 0-5: Spun up Hetzner in Helsinki. Got the IP. Updated DNS.
Minutes 5-8: SSH'd in, ran the Dokploy installer:
curl -sSL https://dokploy.com/install.sh | shOne command. Dokploy installed Docker, Traefik, PostgreSQL, everything.
Minutes 8-12: Connected Git repos. Paste GitHub URL, select branch, done.
Fig. 5 · connecting a repo is a URL and a branch.
Minutes 12-15: Hit deploy on all 5 projects. Watched them come back to life.
Fig. 6 · all five projects coming back to life.
The Fiance woke up. dilharia.love was live.
what surprised me
SSL just works. Traefik + Let's Encrypt provision certificates automatically. I'm running Cloudflare Full (Strict) mode - zero warnings.
WWW redirects? One checkbox. Netlify charged extra for this.
Logs and monitoring built-in. No Datadog bill. No "$500/month observability platform."
Fig. 7 · SSL, logs, and monitoring without a separate bill.
the catch
You own the ops. Server goes down? That's on you. No 99.9% SLA.
You handle security: OS updates, SSH keys, backups. I run apt upgrade weekly and backup to Backblaze B2 for $0.50/month.
For personal projects? Worth it. For business-critical stuff? Pay for managed services.
one month later
Server load: 8% CPU. Zero downtime. SSL renewals automatic.
All 5 sites running smoothly: linkedintel.ai pulling data, sachin.cool looking sharp, dilharia.love collecting RSVPs.
Deployed 3 more projects since then. No credit anxiety. No surprise bills.
Total maintenance time: 10 minutes/week.