Strapi self hosted. The same admin panel, on a machine with your name on it.

• Five separately generated secrets, every one persisted: JWT_SECRET, ADMIN_JWT_SECRET, APP_KEYS, API_TOKEN_SALT and TRANSFER_TOKEN_SALT. Upstream reuses one value for two of them and omits the salts entirely, which silently invalidates every API token and transfer token you have issued the moment the container restarts.
• API_TOKEN_SALT persisted, so the API tokens your frontend holds keep working after a redeploy.
• TRANSFER_TOKEN_SALT persisted, which is what makes Strapi's own data tooling usable here.
• DATABASE_* wired to the bundled PostgreSQL 16, generated per deployment, never a documented default.
• STRAPI_TELEMETRY_DISABLED=true. Usage telemetry is off.
• TLS per hostname, issued and renewed automatically, and a default-deny firewall with only 22, 80 and 443 open.

No Selfhost.dev template ever boots on a documented default password. If credential seeding fails, the instance boots locked rather than open.

We manage infrastructure, not application administration. There is no Strapi administration service here.

A project server holds up to five workloads in total. Strapi is classed light, so it reserves 512 MB of the pack rather than the 2,048 MB a heavy template takes.

Strapi Cloud charges $1.50 per 25,000 API requests over its allowance and $30 per 100 GB of asset bandwidth. A headless CMS exists to serve API requests, so a per-request charge is a bill that grows with use. If your credit balance reaches zero the server stops and the content API stops answering, which will show up on any site consuming it. Your data stays on the disk while the server exists, so topping up brings it back as it was. Signing up adds $5 in free credit, no card needed.

Strapi is one of the faster templates we run: about six minutes, which is the platform's own budget rather than an estimate.

Two Strapi projects on Starter are $70 a month before any overage. Two on a European 4 GB server are $15.18, and the second one changes nothing.

An additional Space licence on Lite is $850 a month, so a second project on Contentful is $1,150. A second project here is $15.18, because it is the same server. Worth knowing: the real ceiling on Contentful's free tier is 10,000 records on the Starter Space, not the ten users. Ten users sounds generous until the content hits five figures.

This is not a price-parity claim. Hetzner's own list price for a comparable machine is lower than ours, and the difference pays for the wiring, the certificate, the monitoring and the restarts.

• This deployment runs NODE_ENV=development on a development image, deliberately. That is what keeps the content-type builder usable in the admin panel, which is the thing most people want Strapi for. It is not a production build and we are not going to pretend it is. If you need a production build, that is a different deployment and we should talk about it first.
• The content API under /api/* returns 403 or 404 until an admin grants permissions. That is Strapi working as designed, not a broken deploy, and it is the first thing to do after logging in.
• Admin registration closes once the first account exists. Claim it before you share the address.
• The server is sized when you deploy it and is not expanded in place, so pick the size you want to grow into. Uploaded media accumulates on that disk.

• strapi export produces an encrypted, compressed archive containing the project configuration, every entity, the relations between them, the assets in the uploads folder, the schemas and a metadata file. strapi import reads it back.
• Optional whole-server backups cover the entire machine at +20% of the server price, daily, with the last seven kept.
• Your own dump, any time. pg_dump against the bundled PostgreSQL 16 restores onto any PostgreSQL 16, ours or anyone else's.
• Uploaded media sits in the strapi-uploads volume, so a file-level copy of that directory belongs in the same routine as the database dump.

Two published limits, worth knowing before you rely on the archive: admin users and API tokens are not transferred, and schemas are always exported, because schema matching is what strapi import uses. Deleting the server takes its backup images with it, which is why a copy kept somewhere else is worth the ten minutes.