Self-Hosted Stack
Running my own services on a VPS — from Gitea to Nextcloud. Full control, full responsibility.
Digital Playground
Break things on purpose. ...then learn why they broke.
Welcome to dipo.app — my personal lab where I run experiments across the full spectrum of self-hosted tech. From spinning up VPS instances to tinkering with WordPress, from bare-metal setups to managed shared hosting, this is where curiosity meets the terminal.
Start with practical notes on self-hosting, VPS setup, reverse proxies, and WordPress performance.
01 / Experiments
WordPress Lab
Dissecting themes, plugins, and performance. Headless, classic, multisite — testing them all.
VPS vs Shared
Benchmarking real-world performance differences between VPS providers and shared hosting environments.
Reverse Proxy Setup
Exploring Nginx, Caddy, and Traefik to route traffic across multiple apps and domains cleanly.
DNS & Networking
Custom DNS resolvers, Pi-hole experiments, split-horizon DNS and other rabbit holes.
Shared Hosting Limits
Documenting what's actually possible on shared hosting — the surprising wins and hard walls.
02 / Latest Notes
Traefik as a Reverse Proxy: Automatic HTTPS for All Your Services
How I replaced my Nginx reverse proxy config with Traefik and got automatic SSL certificates, service discovery, and a dashboard — with a fraction of the config.
Read note →WordPress on a VPS: Getting Under 1 Second Load Times
My actual config for running a fast WordPress site on a $6/month VPS — Nginx, PHP-FPM, object caching, and the mistakes I made along the way.
Read note →
Getting Started with Self-Hosting: A Beginner's VPS Guide
Everything I wish I knew before spinning up my first VPS — from picking a provider to running your first Docker container.
Read note → dipo@playground ~
➜ ssh root@dipo.app Welcome to the digital playground, Dipo. ➜ ls ./experiments/ selfhosted/ wordpress/ vps/ shared-hosting/ networking/ reverse-proxy/ ➜ cat philosophy.txt "The best way to learn infrastructure is to own it — every layer." ➜
02 / About
Built by
curiosity,
not curriculum.
I'm Dipo, and dipo.app is where I document my journey through the digital infrastructure world. Not as a polished portfolio — as a living log of experiments, failures, and occasional victories.
I believe in owning your stack. From the first SSH connection to a fresh VPS to optimizing a WordPress site on shared hosting — every environment teaches something different.
This playground exists because reading tutorials isn't enough. You have to break things to understand them.
Experiments run 40+
Servers destroyed 12×
Things self-hosted 18+
Uptime (sometimes) 99%
Cups of coffee ∞
03 / Contact
Let's talk infrastructure.
Got a question, an idea, or just want to nerd out about self-hosting? The terminal is always open.