Show HN: DockerHoster – Self-hosted alternative to Vercel with auto-deployments

Description and use

DockerHoster lets you host 20+ sites on a single $12/month VPS with a simple push‑to‑deploy workflow via GitHub Actions, fully supporting Docker, databases, cronjobs, and long‑running processes.

Problem

High per-project hosting costs and serverless limitations (no databases, cronjobs, long-running processes) on Vercel.

Outcome

DockerHoster enables a Vercel-like push-to-deploy workflow on a single low-cost VPS, supporting any language/framework, full Docker ecosystem, and eliminating serverless limitations.

Workflow

• 1. Spin up a $12/month VPS (e.g., DigitalOcean droplet).
• 2. Install Docker, Docker Compose, and nginx-proxy on the VPS.
• 3. Copy the provided GitHub Actions workflow and docker-compose.yml into each project repository.
• 4. Set VIRTUAL_HOST environment variable in docker-compose to route traffic via nginx-proxy.
• 5. Push code to GitHub; GitHub Actions triggers DockerHoster to build and deploy the container automatically.
• 6. (Optional) Configure Cloudflare for DNS, SSL, DDoS protection, and WAF.

Evidence

I built DockerHoster after getting tired of paying per-project hosting fees. It’s a one-command setup that lets you host 20+ websites on a single $12/month VPS with automated GitHub deployments.

Source

Works with any language/framework (Next.js, Python, Rails, Go, etc.) - Full Docker ecosystem access (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, AI vector DBs, etc.) - No serverless limitations (cronjobs, SQLite, file system access all work)

Source