Self-Hosting like it's 2025

If you self host, do not use containers and all those things.

Just use a static site generator like zola or hugo and rsync to a small VPS running caddy or nginx. If you need dynamic thing, there are many frameworks you can just rsync too with little dependencies. Or use PHP, it's not that bad. Just restrict all locations except public ones to your ip in nginx config if you use something like wordpress and you should be fine.

If you have any critical stuff, create a zfs dataset and use that to backup to another VPS using zfs send, there are tools to make it easy, much easier than DB replication.

What I'm reading is not to use containers for a web server, which makes sense because web servers have had vhosts since forever and you can host any number of sites on there independently already

But what about other services, like if you want a database server as well, a mail server, etc.?

I started using containers when I last upgraded hardware and while it's not as beneficial as I had hoped, it's still an improvement to be able to clone one, do a test upgrade, and only then upgrade the original one, as well as being able to upgrade services one by one rather than committing to a huge project where you upgrade the host OS and everything has to come with to the new major version