Coolify doesn’t have to run on the machine that hosts your services. It can manage a remote server over SSH — in my case, over a Tailscale network between two laptops.
The payoff is decoupling. Laptop 1 runs only Coolify (the control plane); laptop 2 runs every container. If the Coolify box goes down, nothing stops — Docker containers don’t need their manager to keep running; I just can’t deploy until it’s back. And if a runaway workload eats the services box, the deploy tooling is untouched and redeploying elsewhere is a dashboard action, not a rebuild.
The same pattern scales: one Coolify instance can manage several worker machines. Full architecture: My $0 Infrastructure Stack.