The stack
Single VPS (~₹800/month) running: Mailcow (18M emails, 12 domains), NextCloud (22-user collaboration), Tailscale mesh VPN, 23 MCP servers + Qdrant vector DB.
What it replaced
Google Workspace, LucidLink, scattered dev tools. Total savings: lakhs annually. See Lessons from Infrastructure for the philosophy behind self-hosting.
Mail server hardening
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for every domain. Rspamd for anti-spam. ClamAV for virus scanning. Deliverability was the hardest part — it took weeks of warming up the IP and tweaking DNS records.
The mesh VPN
Tailscale + Caddy + dnsmasq turned underpowered dev machines into a distributed build cluster. Developers can access services by name on the private network. See Tools I Can't Live Without for the specific tools.
AI tooling
23 custom MCP servers handle code review, deployment, log analysis, docs generation, and semantic search. Qdrant indexes the entire codebase. This was the highest-leverage infrastructure investment I've made.
Lessons learned
The biggest lesson: self-hosting is a commitment. You're the sysadmin now. Automated backups, monitoring, and runbooks are non-negotiable. More in Lessons from Infrastructure.