Homelab Hosting Options

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Background

I currently have a ton of side projects live. They are almost all running as Docker containers on Google CloudRun.

CloudRun has a pretty generous free plan, but with all the traffic from AI crawlers, they are starting to get expensive to run.

So I’m looking at running them in my basement. I have plenty of old-but-perfectly-good machines. I’m on a 1 gig fiber connection (and I’m not that concerned if performance isn’t the best). I plan on hooking them up to the internet via Cloudflare Tunnel so I don’t have to worry about getting a public IP/etc.

This is my research into the possible options.

Criteria

• Docker support - since all my projects are bundled into Docker images.
• Web UI - if I wanted to run everything from the command line, I would just run docker images. I wouldn’t mind a TUI either.
• Free - since none of the side projects are money makers.
• Clustering not important - these are side projects and I don’t need to run multiple instances.
• Easy to use - these are side projects: I won’t take a lot of time to learn and maintain them.
• Not Kubernetes - I use it professionally, and don’t enjoy the complexity.

Options

CapRover

• Source: TypeScript

Kamal

• Source: Ruby
• Backed by 37signals/basecamp

OpenRun

• Source: Go

To do

• Dockge
• Dokploy
• Coolify
• Latitude
• Rancher Desktop
• RunTipi

Rejected

• Agnost: Kubernetes under the hood. TypeScript source
• Canine - Kubernetes. Ruby source
• Deis - focused on Kubernetes
• Dokku - UI is $850 upgrade Go source
• FlightControl - AWS only
• Piku - Only support runtimes (Procfiles), not Docker Python source
• Portainer - No: Home & Student version cost $149.
• Porter - Cloud only, commercial
• Pulumi - Upselling too much
• Rio - dead
• Tau - Too complex. Go source
• Tsuru - Kubernetes behind the scenes. Go Source