Why is self-hosting still this painful in 2026?
This weekend, I tried to set up a clean self-hosted stack.
Nothing crazy. Just a couple of services I wanted to run locally.
What I expected:
- spin up a few containers
- connect them
- done
What actually happened:
- Docker configs everywhere
- random ports colliding
- containers breaking for no reason
At some point I just stopped and thought:
why is this still so painful?
We have amazing tools.
We have Docker. We have open source everything.
And yet, setting up a simple stack still feels like:
- reading docs for hours
- debugging weird issues
- copy-pasting configs you barely understand
It doesn’t feel like building.
It feels like maintenance.
And I think that’s the real problem.
Not the tools themselves.
But how fragmented everything is.
Every tool:
- different setup
- different conventions
- different expectations
So nothing really fits together.
I don’t have a solution (yet).
But I’m starting to explore one.
More on that soon.
