Your Vercel Deploys Run on Someone Else's Server — Own Your Data Instead

Every time you deploy to a managed platform, your source code, environment variables, and user data pass through someone else's infrastructure. For many teams, that's a calculated risk. For regulated industries, growing startups, and privacy-conscious developers, it's a dealbreaker.

Self-hosted deployment platforms like Temps give you the convenience of Vercel with full control over where your code runs and where your data lives.

This guide explains the security and compliance advantages of self-hosting, and how to get them without hiring a DevOps team.

The Hidden Risk of Managed Platforms

Managed platforms abstract away infrastructure. That abstraction is convenient — but it comes with tradeoffs you might not have considered.

Your Source Code Lives on Their Servers

When you connect a Git repository to Vercel, Netlify, or Railway, your code is pulled, built, and cached on their infrastructure. You're trusting that:

• Their build servers are properly isolated
• Your code isn't accessible to other tenants
• Build artifacts are cleaned up after deployment
• No employee can access your repository contents

Most platforms handle this well. But "trust us" isn't a compliance strategy.

Environment Variables Are Stored Externally

Your database URLs, API keys, and secrets sit in a third-party vault you don't control. If that platform is breached, your secrets are exposed — and you might not even know about it until the disclosure.

In 2024 alone, multiple hosting platforms disclosed security incidents affecting customer credentials.

User Data Passes Through Third-Party Infrastructure

If your application handles sensitive data (health records, financial information, personal data), every request routes through your platform provider's network. Depending on your regulatory requirements, this may violate data residency rules.

What Self-Hosting Actually Means in 2026

Self-hosting doesn't mean racking servers in a closet. Modern self-hosted platforms like Temps run on any cloud provider — AWS, Hetzner, DigitalOcean, or your own hardware.

What You Control

What You Don't Have to Manage

Temps handles the complexity of deployment orchestration, SSL provisioning, health checks, and log aggregation. You're not writing Dockerfiles and nginx configs — you're running a platform that happens to live on your servers.

Compliance Requirements That Demand Self-Hosting

GDPR (European Data Protection)

GDPR requires that personal data be processed with appropriate safeguards. If your managed platform runs on US infrastructure, you need to ensure adequate data transfer mechanisms are in place.

With self-hosting, you choose where your servers live. Deploy to Hetzner's Helsinki data center, and your EU user data never leaves Finland.

# Deploy to a server you control in your chosen region
curl -fsSL https://temps.sh/deploy.sh | bash
bunx @temps-sdk/cli login
bunx @temps-sdk/cli deploy my-app -e production -y

HIPAA (Healthcare Data)

HIPAA requires a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with any vendor that handles Protected Health Information (PHI). Most deployment platforms either don't offer BAAs or charge enterprise pricing for them.

Self-hosting removes this requirement entirely. Your PHI never touches a third-party platform.

SOC 2

SOC 2 compliance requires demonstrating control over your systems. When your deployment platform is a black box, proving control is difficult. When it runs on your infrastructure with your access policies, the audit trail is clear.

PCI DSS (Payment Data)

If you process payment card data, PCI DSS requires strict control over the environment. Self-hosting lets you define and enforce the security boundaries yourself.

Security Advantages of Self-Hosting with Temps

1. Network Isolation

Your applications run in a network you control. You define firewall rules, VPN access, and network segmentation. No shared infrastructure with other tenants.

2. Secret Management on Your Terms

Environment variables are encrypted and stored on your server. Use your own KMS, your own rotation policies, your own access controls.

# Secrets never leave your infrastructure
bunx @temps-sdk/cli environments vars set -e production STRIPE_SECRET_KEY "sk_live_..." --secret
bunx @temps-sdk/cli environments vars set -e production DATABASE_URL "postgresql://..." --secret

3. Audit Logging

Every deployment, every access, every configuration change is logged on your infrastructure. Export to your SIEM, apply your retention policies, run your own analysis.

4. No Supply Chain Risk from the Platform

When a managed platform pushes an update, it affects all customers simultaneously. A bug in their deployment pipeline could expose your application. With self-hosting, you control when platform updates are applied.

5. Incident Response Under Your Control

If something goes wrong, you don't wait for a status page update. You have direct access to servers, logs, and network traffic. Your incident response team works on your timeline, not the platform's.

Common Objections (And Honest Answers)

"Self-hosting is too much work"

Traditional self-hosting, yes. But Temps installs in 5 minutes and handles SSL, builds, deployments, monitoring, and analytics automatically. The operational overhead is comparable to managing a single VPS.

"Managed platforms have better security teams"

True — large platforms invest heavily in security. But they're also larger targets. Self-hosting reduces your attack surface because your deployment platform isn't a publicly known service with thousands of customers.

"We don't handle sensitive data"

You might not handle PHI or payment data, but you almost certainly handle:

• User email addresses (personal data under GDPR)
• Authentication tokens
• API keys to third-party services
• Business logic that constitutes trade secrets

All of this is safer on infrastructure you control.

"Our team doesn't have DevOps expertise"

Temps is designed for teams without dedicated DevOps. If you can deploy to Vercel, you can deploy to Temps. The difference is that Temps runs on a $20/month VPS you own instead of shared infrastructure you don't.

Migration Path: From Managed to Self-Hosted

Step 1: Provision Your Server

Choose any cloud provider. A 4-core, 8GB VPS handles most workloads:

Step 2: Install Temps

curl -fsSL https://temps.sh/deploy.sh | bash

Step 3: Connect Your Repository

Same workflow as any managed platform — connect GitHub, push code, get a deployment.

Step 4: Migrate Environment Variables

# Export from your current platform and import
bunx @temps-sdk/cli environments vars import -e production -f .env.production

Step 5: Update DNS

Point your domain to your new server. Temps handles SSL automatically.

What You Gain, What You Trade

You Gain

• Full data sovereignty — data stays where you put it
• Predictable costs — no per-seat or bandwidth surprises
• Complete audit trail — every action logged on your infrastructure
• Regulatory compliance — meet GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, PCI requirements
• Reduced vendor risk — no dependency on a platform's business decisions

You Trade

• 5 minutes of setup — one-time installation
• Server maintenance — OS updates, disk monitoring (Temps helps with alerts)
• Slightly more responsibility — but with proportionally more control

For most teams, that tradeoff is worth it.

Getting Started

If security and compliance matter to your team — or if you simply want to know where your code and data live — try Temps:

curl -fsSL https://temps.sh/deploy.sh | bash

Your code. Your data. Your infrastructure.

Have questions about compliance or security? Check our documentation or reach out on Discord.