I run my entire digital life on two Contabo VPS servers in Germany. Personal site, photography portfolio, business site, email, password vault, analytics, monitoring - all of it. No AWS. No Vercel. No managed anything. Just Docker, Traefik, and a lot of evenings spent getting things right.
This is not a tutorial. This is a walkthrough of what I actually built, why I built it this way, and what I learned along the way.
The servers
Two VPS boxes at Contabo, both in Germany. That matters to me - European hosting, European jurisdiction, GDPR by default.