I’ve been self-hosting since the '90s. I used to have an NT 3.51 server in my house. I had a dial in BBS that worked because of an extensive collection of .bat files that would echo AT commands to my COM ports to reset the modems between calls. I remember when we had to compile the slackware kernel from source to get peripherals to work.

But in this last year I took the time to seriously learn docker/podman, and now I’m never going back to running stuff directly on the host OS.

I love it because I can deploy instantly… Oftentimes in a single command line. Docker compose allows for quickly nuking and rebuilding, oftentimes saving your entire config to one or two files.

And if you need to slap in a traefik, or a postgres, or some other service into your group of containers, now it can be done in seconds completely abstracted from any kind of local dependencies. Even more useful, if you need to move them from one VPS to another, or upgrade/downgrade core hardware, it’s now a process that takes minutes. Absolutely beautiful.