Cloudron Hosting on Your Own VPS

What Cloudron is

Cloudron is not a traditional control panel — it is a platform for running self-hosted applications. You install it once, then install applications from its store, and it handles the parts that usually make self-hosting tiring: TLS certificates, DNS records, backups, and version updates for every app it manages.

The single sign-on is the feature people stay for. Cloudron runs a directory, so one set of credentials works across every application it installs. Adding a team member to Nextcloud, a wiki and a chat server becomes one action rather than three.

The trade-off is explicit and worth understanding: applications run in containers Cloudron manages, on a schedule Cloudron decides. That is the opposite of the control you get installing an application directly. You still have root on the VPS — but inside Cloudron, you are working the way Cloudron works. Choose it when you want less maintenance, not more control.

How deployment works

Cloudron installs onto a clean Ubuntu image and takes over the machine's web-facing stack, so it should be the only thing on the server. You need a domain it can manage DNS for. You keep root on the host; applications themselves run inside Cloudron's containers by design.