StackRecipes is about one thing: running the tools you buy, on infrastructure you control.
Every week, developers and small businesses buy a script on CodeCanyon, sign up for another SaaS subscription, or spin up a managed platform — and then discover the recurring cost, the vendor lock-in, or the limits that were not obvious on the sales page. Very often, the same result can be self-hosted on a modest VPS for the price of a coffee a month.
The hard part is never the idea. It is the gap between “install it on your server” and a setup that actually survives contact with production: TLS certificates that renew, backups you have tested, isolated PHP pools so one site cannot take down another, DNS that resolves the way you think it does.
That gap is what we write about.
What you will find here
- Tutorials — step-by-step deployments, written against a specific stack and a specific version, with the commands we actually ran.
- Reviews — scripts, panels and self-hosted alternatives we have installed ourselves and lived with long enough to have an opinion.
- Comparisons — self-hosted versus managed, one tool against another, with the trade-offs stated plainly.
- Troubleshooting — the errors that cost us an evening, and what actually fixed them.
- VPS hosting — provisioning, hardening, monitoring and backups on small servers.
How we work
We install everything we write about. No article here is a rewrite of a vendor’s marketing page. If a procedure is published on StackRecipes, it was run on a real server first, and the output you see is the output we got.
We say when something does not work. A tool that is slow, badly documented or fragile gets described that way. A tutorial that only works on a specific version says so.
We show our versions. Self-hosting advice ages badly. Articles state the operating system, the runtime and the software version they were tested against, so you can judge how much has drifted since.
Commissions never buy a verdict. Some links on this site earn us a commission, at no extra cost to you. It changes nothing about what we recommend, and we say so on every page where it applies. The full detail is in our Affiliate Disclosure.
Who is behind it
StackRecipes is published by Agentaria LLC. We run our own production websites on exactly the kind of infrastructure we write about — small VPS instances hosting several unrelated applications side by side — which is where most of the material on this site comes from. When we document a backup routine or a firewall rule, it is because we needed it ourselves first.
Get in touch
Found an error in an article, or want to suggest a tool we should test? We read everything. Write to us at info@stackrecipes.com or use the contact page. Corrections are welcome and are credited.