Update, May 21, 2026: I now use Terraform + Kamal 2 on Hetzner for my main products and most older projects. A few projects are still exceptions, but Hetzner + Kamal is my default now. If you are looking for my current Terraform and Kamal setup, start with Terraform for Indie Hackers. This post is mainly about the older Digital Ocean demo repositories.

I typically run my projects on Render. Simple, no fuss, mostly works great. I needed to run ffmpeg for one project I was researching into. This led me down a rabbit hole of self-hosted servers and inevitably, to Hetzner and Kamal.

Or rather, Kamal 2. I heard the buzz recently and watched dhh’s video about Kamal 2. They explicitly had support for running multiple projects on a single server 1.

Now I used to manage my own servers, with Ansible and Capistrano. But that was many years ago. So I looked around to see what would be suitable now and save me time. After some digging, I found this repo by Dylan Castillo that uses Terraform to provision a Hetzner server. Great stuff, and exactly what I needed. I adapted it to match my needs and set up an existing project of mine to use Kamal for deployment to kick the tires.

Only one problem: I had 2 web servers — a frontend running Vue and a backend running Node.js/bun. The video (and Rails typically) only use 1 web server.

Then there’s Hetzner’s reliability — I read about multiple accounts of them apparently randomly blocking accounts. Who knows why. Might be legit, but I don’t want to waste time on such drama.

So I turned to Digital Ocean. I used them a few years ago. Just took a couple of emails and some ID verification to get my login working again (+1 for their timely support!). Digital Ocean is pricier, but at my modest needs, the cost bump is negligible.

A few more days and more trial-and-errors later, I finally had a working setup.

Terraform and Kamal deployment architecture diagram

Here’s what I ended up with, and maybe it’ll save someone else a headache or two:

A. Digital Ocean Terraform Demo — this repo provisions a single server on Digital Ocean. You can modify a parameter to provision a beefy server for those “throw everything on one box” scenarios.

B. Kamal Frontend/Backend Demo — this repo is an example of a node.js/bun stack frontend, backend, database stack — all on one server. Deploys with Kamal 2.

  1. Potentially adding more for redundancy, but I’ll try to keep them stateless to keep things simpler ↩