9 min read
Deployment Guides Self-Hosted vs. Fully Managed Hosting Platforms in 2026
Not sure whether to self-host or use a fully managed platform? This guide breaks down the real trade-offs, costs, and use cases so you can choose the right path.
Noah Dubois
About
Noah Dubois is a Platform Engineer and open source contributor based in Paris with 8 years of experience running production infrastructure on Linux, bare metal servers, and self-hosted PaaS platforms. He actively maintains open source projects on GitHub with a combined 2,400+ stars and has contributed to Coolify, Dokku, and several community-managed deployment tooling projects. Noah came up through the self-hosting world running his own VPS clusters, building internal deployment tooling, and helping engineering communities understand when DIY infrastructure actually saves money versus when it quietly consumes the engineering hours it was supposed to free up. He has a clear-eyed view of the trade-offs: self-hosting done right is powerful; self-hosting done wrong is a 2am pager rotation. At Kuberns, Noah writes about the open source deployment ecosystem, how self-hosted tools compare to managed platforms, where the gaps are, and how agentic AI is changing the calculation for teams that previously had no choice but to manage their own infrastructure.
