It’s fair to say that dipping into the world of self-hosting has been a slow learning curve for me. I’ve tried a fair few methods, copying files manually, running scripts and more, all accompanied with a fair amount of anxiety wondering if I’d missed a step or reused a port. Deployment, if you are not experienced, can definitely feel like a bit of a test. I’ve worked around that for the longest time by keeping things small. Be it sticking to easy to install services, or following tutorials. But that becomes far too limiting beyond a point, and you need to find a better way to work. For me, that better way turned out to be Ansible. Honestly, once you start using it, there’s no going back. Here’s why.