A $12 Netlify Alternative: Caddy, DigitalOcean, and One Shell Script

Published May 1, 2026

I've been hosting my websites on various webhosts for years, and I recently started using Netlify to quickly host some of my vibe coded projects. I love the experience of Netlify and I'm having a blast building and using static HTML again. It's just so fast and agile when combined with an agentic workflow. That said I was making a bunch of tweaks to a site and I quickly hit the cap on Netlify's free tier. I upgraded to the $5/month tier but in classic "Robby move" I decided, why not rebuild the whole thing from scratch and pay more lol.

I thought it would be a fun project to set up a server on DigitalOcean. It's been many, many years, but I used to use Ubuntu as my daily driving operating system, and I hosted my own web server out of my house for a long time. When I started getting into WordPress, my focus shifted more toward WordPress and front-end development, and my days of tinkering with servers came to an end.

Now with the help of my trusted technical adviser (credit to @katiekeithbarn2 the trusted advisor line 😉), Claude, I decided to spin up an inexpensive DigitalOcean server where I could host all of my sites.

$12 a month, DigitalOcean, Ubuntu 24.04, a web server called Caddy. And then I spent a few hours with Claude Code turning it into something I'm genuinely proud of.

The Server

Caddy seems to be the right call. It auto-provisions TLS certificates via Let's Encrypt, handles HTTP/2 out of the box, and the config syntax is clean enough that I actually understand what it says. Adding a new site looks like this:

mysite.com, www.mysite.com {
    root * /var/www/mysite.com
    file_server
}

That's the whole thing. Caddy handles the cert. You point DNS at it and walk away.

My dad used to name his computers after Star Trek spaceships, so I thought doing something galactic and sci-fi would be a nice tribute. I named the server Andromeda.

The Automation

The part I'm most happy about is a script called add-site.sh. You give it a domain and a GitHub repo and it does everything: clones the repo onto the server, updates the Caddyfile, sets the GitHub secrets, creates the Actions deploy workflow, and flips the DNS in Cloudflare. One command. A new site is live in about thirty seconds.

The only downside I can think of is that my annual domain renewal bill is about to explode. Being able to prototype a website, host it, and point a domain with a few spoken commands feels like I'm living in the future.

The Moment It Clicked

When I ran curl -sI https://mybbor.com and saw server: Caddy come back, I did a little fist pump. That's my server. Those are my files. That response came from a $12 machine I configured myself, with a TLS cert that will auto-renew forever.

This kind of setup used to be a multi-day project with a lot of Stack Overflow and a lot of broken configs. Doing it with agentic AI assistance, it was an afternoon and a bike ride.

I've got a few more sites to migrate. Then I want to set up self-hosted analytics. The server's sitting there ready.

Try It Yourself

If you want to replicate this setup, here's a starting prompt you can paste into your agent of choice. It won't be a perfect fit out of the box — you'll need to adapt it to your domain registrar, GitHub username, and server preferences — but it'll get you most of the way there.

Note: This is a starting point, not a complete recipe. Expect to iterate, answer questions, and make decisions along the way. That's half the fun.

I want to set up a self-hosted web server for my static HTML sites. Here's what I'm working with:

- My sites are static HTML, stored locally and pushed to GitHub
- I want to host them on a DigitalOcean droplet running Caddy as the web server
- I want automatic deployment via GitHub Actions: push to main → site updates live
- I'm using Cloudflare for DNS (grey cloud / DNS-only mode so Caddy handles TLS)
- I want a reusable script that can add new sites with one command

Please walk me through the full setup end to end:
1. Creating and hardening the DigitalOcean droplet (Ubuntu, deploy user, UFW firewall)
2. Installing and configuring Caddy
3. Setting up GitHub Actions deployment (SSH key, secrets, workflow file)
4. Configuring DNS in Cloudflare
5. Building an add-site.sh script that automates steps 2–4 for each new site

Start by asking me for any details you need (server IP, GitHub username, domains, etc.), then let's go step by step.

petalumaphotography.com, mybbor.com, and 475th.com are both live on Andromeda now. aprilfifteenth.com will be up shortly.