Dokku Hosting on Your Own VPS
Git-push deployment on your own server — a personal PaaS without per-dyno pricing.
Size a server for Dokku
Every stop is a real configuration you can deploy. Priced per month and billed monthly, exclusive of 18% GST.
What Dokku is
Dokku is a small platform-as-a-service you run yourself. Push a Git branch and it builds your application with Heroku buildpacks or a Dockerfile, provisions a container, wires up a domain and issues a certificate. The developer experience is deliberately close to Heroku's.
The appeal is economic and practical. PaaS pricing scales per application instance, which gets expensive when you run several small services that each need almost nothing. On Dokku, ten small applications share one VPS and cost what that VPS costs.
What you give up is the operations team. Nobody patches the host, nobody restores it if the disk fills, and there is no multi-region failover — it is one machine. That is a reasonable trade for side projects, staging environments and internal tools; it is a decision to make carefully for anything where downtime has a cost.
“Docker powered mini-Heroku. The smallest PaaS implementation you've ever seen.”
Why run Dokku on a VPS
Root access, which Dokku needs to manage Docker, NGINX and certificates.
Several applications on one VPS at one server price.
Databases as Dokku plugins on the same machine, linked automatically.
Resize when the applications outgrow the plan, without changing workflow.
Dokku features
Git-push deployment with Heroku buildpacks
Dockerfile deployment when buildpacks do not fit
Automatic NGINX configuration per application
Free TLS with automatic renewal
Plugins for PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis and more
Zero-downtime deploys with health checks
Environment variables and config management
Dokku hosting requirements
The recommended starting point for Dokku, not a hard floor — size it on the sliders.
| Memory | 4 GB for a few applications; 8 GB for many or for local databases |
|---|---|
| CPU | 2 vCPU; builds are the CPU spike |
| Storage | 80 GB — Docker images and build caches accumulate quietly |
| Operating system | Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, which Dokku targets directly |
| Installs on | Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Debian 12 Bookworm |
| Ready in | About 8 minutes |
| Smallest server | 2 vCPU · 4 GB memory · 20 GB disk |
How deployment works
Dokku is installed on a clean Ubuntu image and takes ownership of Docker, NGINX and port 80/443. Applications deploy by Git push. Watch disk over time — old images and build caches accumulate, and a full disk on a single-machine PaaS takes everything down at once.
What people run it for
Side projects
Several small applications on one server instead of several PaaS bills.
Staging environments
Review apps per branch without per-instance cost.
Internal tools
Small services deployed by push, without a pipeline to maintain.
Leaving Heroku
A near-identical workflow at server prices.
Dokku hosting questions
Related applications
Portainer Hosting A web interface for Docker — containers, images, volumes and networks, without living in the CLI. 
GitLab Hosting Repositories, CI/CD and a container registry on your own server. 
Redis Hosting In-memory cache, sessions and queues, priced as memory rather than per gigabyte. 
Grafana Hosting Dashboards and alerting over your own metrics, without per-seat or per-metric billing. 
Windmill Hosting Scripts become APIs, workflows and internal UIs — with executions bounded by your server, not a plan. Deploy Dokku on your own server
Root access, your choice of size, and no container between you and the application.