This content originally appeared on Go Make Things and was authored by Go Make Things
Today, I wanted to share how I built my own DIY Netlify that I use to host over a dozen sites for just $10/month, with way more control and much faster build times.
Let’s dig in!
The Netlify Revolution
A few years back, Netlify helped usher in the era of static site generators by offering a really easy way for folks to host and deploy static HTML.
All you had to do was push your site to GitHub. They would build it, host it, and deploy it for you automatically.
They added serverless features so that you could easily add interactive functions to your static site. They added an easy way to accept form submissions and receive an email. They added a CND layer. They wrote a CMS for managing content.
But, like all services propped up with VC money and pricing that doesn’t reflect costs, the chickens have come home to roost.
The Shoe Drops
First, prices went up.
And now they’ve introduced a credit-based model that will almost certainly cost some folks a lot of money, especially as bots and AI dominate the web and send mountains of fake traffic to sites.
This is the inevitable future of all companies that burn VC money building services that they sell for way less than they cost.
Get people hooked, undercut the competition, then crank up prices and ruin the offering.
Here’s how you can cut ties.
DIY Netlify
For me, the winning combo has been DigitalOcean plus Serverpilot.
DigitalOcean provides affordable VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting on SSD-based servers. They have fantastic uptime, and generous storage and transfer rates.
I host all of my sites on a single $5/month Droplet. I also added their automated backup service, which costs me about a extra $1/month.
If you’re not a Dev Ops person (I’m very much not), VPS’s can feel overwhelming AF. They certainly do to me!
That’s where Serverpilot comes in.
They add a management layer over your cloud hosting. They claim to work with any cloud hosting provider, but I’ve only ever used them with DigitalOcean.
I use their $5/month economy plan.
That gets me…
- An automatically installed LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)
- One-click PHP version upgrades
- One-click database creation (which I don’t need but is nice to have)
- An NGinx layer over Apache for better performance
- A firewall
- An automatically setup SSH user
- The ability to host multiple sites on a single DigitalOcean Droplet
- One-click SSL install with automatic renewals
- HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 support
- Automatic security updates
… and probably more stuff I’m forgetting. It’s a really good service that I’ve been using for a decade now. Money well spent!
So that covers hosting, but what about all of the other stuff?
Deployment, microservices, and more!
So what about of the other stuff Netlify offers?
I automatically deploy my site from GitHub using a webhook. It’s orders of magnitude faster than Netlify’s builds.
I schedule posts ahead of time using a cron job on my server.
Because my server runs PHP, I write my own tiny backends in PHP to receive form inputs and email me when stuff happens. I use the PHPMailer library with SMTP to make sure I actually get the emails.
I also use PHP to write my own tiny APIs. Its my own server, so I don’t need a third party like AWS Lambda to setup microservices. It’s fast. It’s easy. It just works.
I can store keys and secrets and such as environment variables in a .env file on my server.
Netlify doesn’t maintain a CMS anymore, so even Netlify users need a third-party option. For clients, I like PageCMS, which is much easier to setup than other options.
I can revert to previous versions by rolling back my code on GitHub.
What’s missing?
I don’t have preview deploys like Netlify does. But for my personal stuff, I don’t need them. I’m building locally on my machine, anyways.
I don’t have a CDN layer over my whole site. I could easily add one with Cloudflare or Fastly or something. But from my testing, my sites are absurdly fast already, even for folks on the other side of the world.
If I needed autoscaling, that’s an option from DigitalOcean I could add, but I don’t need it.
There’s no built-in analytics, but again, I could add that if I wanted it. I don’t, so I haven’t.
Own your stuff
I feel really strongly that as a general rule, but especially in the current tech and political climate, it’s important to own your stack.
Use third-party services, of course. I’m not hosting my site on a literal computer in my home.
But own the process. Own the setup. Own the code.
Make it as easy as possible to move elsewhere if you need to.
Like this? A Lean Web Club membership is the best way to support my work and help me create more free content.
This content originally appeared on Go Make Things and was authored by Go Make Things
Go Make Things | Sciencx (2025-09-19T14:30:00+00:00) DIY Netlify. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/09/19/diy-netlify/
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