The Dokploy Cloud Alternative: Your Own Dashboard on One HA Server
Dokploy Cloud hosts the Dokploy dashboard for $4.50 per server per month and leaves the servers your apps run on to you. Self-hosting puts that dashboard on the first of those servers instead, for nothing. On a MassiveGRID VPS preset for Dokploy, $9.58 a month buys the server, the control plane stays inside your infrastructure, hardware failover and Ceph storage come with it, and MassiveGRID installs Dokploy for you on request.
A hosted control plane, with your servers still on the bill
Dokploy Cloud runs the dashboard, user accounts, orchestration, monitoring and notifications on the Dokploy team's infrastructure. You connect servers you rent from any provider over SSH, Dokploy installs Docker, Traefik and a monitoring agent on each, and your containers, databases and data run there. The docs put it plainly: "Your code and data never leave your servers." Plans on docs.dokploy.com on 31 October 2026: Hobby $4.50 per server per month, Startup $15 for three servers and $4.50 each beyond, Enterprise and Agency by quote, 20 percent off annually, a 7-day trial.
What the fee buys is real: automatic dashboard updates, someone else's uptime for the control plane, the hosted monitoring dashboard, and a management layer that does not share RAM with your applications. What it does not buy is a server. Every Dokploy Cloud customer still pays a VPS bill for each connected machine, which is why "free versus paid" is the wrong comparison.
The two bills for one, three and ten servers
Same servers on both sides, the MassiveGRID Starter preset (2 vCPU, 4 GB, 64 GB NVMe) at $9.58 on shared cores, because Dokploy Cloud customers need servers too:
| Setup | Self-hosted Dokploy | Dokploy Cloud | Difference per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solo developer, 1 server | $9.58 (dashboard and apps together) | $9.58 + $4.50 = $14.08 | $54 |
| Small team, 3 servers | $28.74 | $28.74 + $15 = $43.74 | $180 |
| Agency, 10 servers | $95.80 | $95.80 + $15 + 7 × $4.50 = $142.30 | $558 |
The self-hosted dashboard takes roughly 350 to 450 MB of RAM from the first server, which is why the Starter preset carries 4 GB rather than the 2 GB the installer accepts. If you want the control plane on its own machine like Cloud, a second Starter server is $9.58, still less than the Cloud fee from three servers up and with the dashboard still yours. Our cost comparison post works through the same figures in detail.
What you gain and what you take on by self-hosting
You gain
- The control plane stays inside your infrastructure. The SSH keys to your servers, the dashboard database and the deployment history live on a machine you own, not on a third party's. For teams that chose self-hosting to get away from external control planes, this is the deciding point.
- No per-server fee, which is a third of the bill at one server and $558 a year at ten.
- Update timing. Pin a release, test on staging, roll production later. Self-hosted only.
- Per-server build concurrency, a self-hosted-only setting useful on a dedicated build server.
You take on
- Updating the dashboard, which is one command (
curl -sSL https://dokploy.com/install.sh | sh -s update) when you choose to run it, with an instance backup first. - Monitoring. The full monitoring dashboard is a Cloud feature; self-hosted shows container metrics and logs, and the Dokploy hardening guide recommends shipping logs to an external system.
- The server's health, which is where the hosting choice matters. On MassiveGRID the server fails over to a healthy node when hardware dies, disks are on Ceph with three replicas, 24/7 support covers everything underneath Dokploy and the engineers install Dokploy for you on request. That is the operational worry Dokploy Cloud answers for the dashboard, answered for the whole machine.
Use a MassiveGRID server under Dokploy Cloud, or switch later
The two are not exclusive. A MassiveGRID VPS works as a connected server under Dokploy Cloud: order it from the Dokploy hosting page, skip the installer, and add its IP and SSH key in the Cloud dashboard. If you are on the 7-day trial and decide to self-host, install Dokploy on that same server and recreate your projects there; your applications keep running on the servers they were on, because only the control plane moves. The reverse works too, so neither decision is final.
One Server, Dashboard Included
Starter runs the dashboard and a few apps for $9.58 a month; switch the toggle to dedicated cores for production builds. The whole stack, dashboard included, lives on this one machine, and Dokploy itself costs nothing.
One Command, Full Platform
SSH into your new MassiveGRID server and run this command. Dokploy will install Docker, set up Traefik, configure SSL, and launch the dashboard automatically.
Requires a fresh server with Ubuntu 24.04 or Debian 12, at least 2 GB of RAM and 30 GB of disk, and ports 80, 443 and 3000 free. The installer needs root access and sets up Docker, Traefik and all dependencies.
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Deploy your Dokploy server in the region closest to your team and users for the lowest latency.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Questions from teams comparing Dokploy Cloud with self-hosting.
Self-host Dokploy for the price of one server
$9.58 a month for the Starter preset, dashboard included, on a Proxmox HA cluster with Ceph storage, a 100% uptime SLA and a 15-day money-back guarantee. Open a ticket after ordering and we install Dokploy for you.