"Self-hosted" sounds like a weekend project involving a terminal, a beard, and a prayer. For the tools in this store, it is closer to installing WordPress: upload a folder, click through a short web form, done. This guide walks through exactly what happens, using the same steps our own Deliora store software documents in its quickstart — every product here follows the same pattern.
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What you actually need
- Any ordinary PHP host. Shared hosting with cPanel or Plesk is fine — if your host can run WordPress, it can run these. The requirement is PHP 8.1+ with the PDO extension, plus MySQL or SQLite for the database; every app's install note names its own floor, and all of them ask for 8.1 or newer; every app is tested on PHP 8.3. No Composer, no Node, no build step.
- Or a small VPS with Docker. A small server works — Hetzner's entry cloud servers were €3.99 a month on its pricing page when machine-read on 10 August 2026; a re-read on 5 September 2026 found that page settling its prices only after you pick a currency and a country for VAT, so take your own figure from it before you budget rather than trusting a headline. The container half needs no such caution — every business tool here ships a Dockerfile, so
docker buildanddocker runstand in for the upload step entirely. - Ten minutes. Honestly: two of them are the installer, the rest is uploading files and making one folder writable. Budget more the first time if hosting panels are new to you.
You do not need a systems administrator, a CI pipeline, or a framework runtime. That is a deliberate engineering choice, not an accident: plain PHP with zero build tooling is the most boring, most portable stack shared hosting has ever supported.
The install, step by step
- Upload the app folder to your web root (or a subdirectory like
/store/or/tools/) with your host's file manager or SFTP. - Make the data directory writable — one permissions click in cPanel's file manager. This is where the SQLite database, uploads, and deliverable files live, and it is the only folder the app writes to.
- Visit /install/ in your browser. A short form asks for the database (MySQL credentials, or SQLite with zero setup), your business name, currency, timezone, and an admin email and password.
- The installer writes the config file and drops you at the login page. That is the whole ceremony. From here you are inside the app, adding your real data.
If you would rather try before touching a server at all, the apps run locally under PHP's built-in web server — one command, no Apache — and every one of the fifty ships a seeder (php bin/seed.php) that fills a fresh install with a lifelike demo dataset. You can click through a working copy with believable records on it before you type in a single real customer.
A useful pattern for cautious buyers: install first with SQLite (zero configuration, one file), evaluate for a week, then re-run the installer against MySQL when you commit. Every app installs against either engine, and the exports mean nothing is lost in the move — though it is worth knowing that a good many product pages name SQLite as the one to trial on and MySQL as the one to settle on, which is the same order this paragraph recommends.
What self-hosting does NOT require
- No external services to sign up for. The core tools call no third-party APIs. (The AI document tools are the explicit exception: they call the one model provider you configure with your own key — and nothing else.)
- No cron jobs for the basics. Where a product uses scheduled work at all (like Slotly's email reminders), it is one documented cron line, and the product works without it.
- No email server on day one. Transactional mail can run through any SMTP account when you are ready; until then it is stored in an admin outbox where you can read every message. Nothing breaks while SMTP is unconfigured.
What you ARE signing up for
Honesty cuts both ways. When you self-host, three jobs move from the vendor's ops team to you:
- Backups. Your data is one database (and one uploads folder). Copying it is trivial — but nobody copies it for you. Set a weekly reminder or use your host's backup feature.
- Updates. New versions are yours to apply — press Check for updates on the app's Updates page (it checks Ownware's signature and takes a backup first), or upload the new files yourself; either way the database upgrades itself in place on first load. Nothing checks for updates or phones home on its own.
- The server itself. HTTPS, PHP version, disk space: standard hosting hygiene, the same as any website you already run.
If those three bullets sound manageable — and on modern shared hosting they genuinely are — you have everything needed to own your tools outright; the full shared-hosting walkthrough has the six steps with the three things that go wrong, and securing a self-hosted business app is the short list after that. Start with the one that hurts most every month: invoicing with Invora, bookings with Slotly, or browse the whole catalog and compare the three-year math first.
And if the operations side is what's holding you back, Ownware Cloud runs every business tool here but the SaaS Kit control plane for you — private instance, nightly backups, and the license becomes yours after twelve paid months. The honest version of that trade is written down before you decide.