I'm a Linux guy and have on many points of my life have a personal server. So I like the idea of having something always on, but I’m not sure the maintenance is worth it when most things can just run on my laptop.
That said, I tend to do things myself and only later realize I could have automated or delegated them, so I may have a blind spot here.
If you have a cheap VPS or mini PC, what actually ended up being useful long-term? Anything that saved enough time or replaced enough subscriptions to justify keeping it around?
I wrote about it a couple days ago actually https://klar.im/blog/launch-a-startup-for-15-euros-a-month
- qBittorrent for "Linux ISOs"
- Jellyfin so I can watch/read/listen to my "Linux ISOs"
- Tailscale so me, my family and friends can watch/read/listen to my "Linux ISOs" from anywhere in the world
- Self hosting my photo albums. Immich is a handy choice for this. Very useful for personal photos you don't want to trust to strange tech companies.
- Gitea for self-hosting git repos for some personal projects I have not open-sourced.
If you're privacy conscious, please be aware that Tailscale by default is creating behavioral metadata from all of those computers for the Room 641As of the world about everything you do on your supposedly “private” network: https://tailscale.com/docs/features/logging
“This includes real-time events for open and close events for every inter-machine connection (TCP or UDP) on your network.”
You can't turn off the centralised element of Tailscale though, i.e. IP tracking etc.
So for the privacy conscious Tailscale remains a poor choice. Especially as they operate under US jurisdiction:
So CLOUD, PATRIOT and friends very much apply to Tailscale.You may jest "but its only metadata", but you can do a lot with metadata, especially if its all nicely attractively centralised like Tailscale.
Headscale turns the $5 VPS into the thing that connects my laptop to my other compute resources while I am out and about.
For example, you can create a token that grants VPN access with inbound SSH as the only allowed traffic. Add that as a secret to GitHub Actions and now you can ad-hoc debug failing CI via `tailscale ssh`.
https://www.wireguard.com/quickstart/
If you don't think 2 hours of professionally produced content is worth $10, well that's why AI isn't the only thing destroying art and culture.
> Linux ISO: A codeword for copyrighted material shared without permission, usually over P2P networks.
[1] http://linux-iso.urbanup.com/2782626
Ask yourself what other types of media can be had on popular torrent sites.
It is generous of you to share your "Linux ISOs" with your family and friends.
It really was common in the early 2000s for Linux distros to provide torrent downloads. Internet speeds were such that downloading peer‐to‐peer could be significantly faster, and (probably more importantly) it saved the distro mirrors a lot of bandwidth. I think this practice has mostly died out among newer distros, but distros from the era such as Ubuntu or Arch still provide them.
I used to do this, until I learned the value of offsite backups.
Learn from my mistake (if you aren't already :) ).
My photos are on: Captured devices(phones, camera). Immich on my homelab, and google photo(which is lossy, but better than nothing).
Granted, an average person most likely will never mess up, but in google-land the surface area where to make that mistake is quite large.
I didn't check ToS of proton drive, but in my experience, every cloud storage has requirement about what kind of data is allowed to store(after all, they dont want to accidentally store illegal stuff).
I then tested restore vis kopia desktop onto my desktop to validate restore works.
13 eur for 5tb is more than enough for immich backups for my personal use.
Inherently to inner copy it provides some redundancy.
Backups need more than one copy.
With qBittorrent.
> Do you prune the ISOs you've already installed somewhere, or are they kept around to be re-installed?
I keep them all. Compression algorithms are pretty good these days, as is storage density.
But yes, Jellyfin can also natively transcode formats on the fly if you stick a GPU in there: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/transcoding/
- fx (my own blog software)
- syncthing (sync files to remote servers for backup)
- borgbackup (store old copies of files for backup; via cron)
- radicale (calendar)
- pingvin-share-x (file sharing with other people)
- Forgejo (GitHub-like clone; using it many times a day most days)
- vaultwarden (self-hosted Bitwarden)
- immich (not really using it much)
- laptop, phone (termux), Linux VPS, and home inference machine can all see each other on the same Wireguard network via the VPS.
- Todo list web app for our family shopping list. Used daily for many years now.
- Personal daily updating dashboard with important numbers I care about, life metrics, weather, etc.
- Projects priority list which tells me what to do each day based on last update for each project (each project has a desired frequency of work and it prioritises by "lateness"). Checks git activity and RSS feeds to see what I'm neglecting.
- "Note to self" app and voice automation which transcribes and adds to my Joplin notebook on my laptop.
- AI agent on my phone I can long-press power button and give spoken commands ("add milk to the shopping list"). Uses private home inference machine, see below.
- Social media POSSE syndication scripts. Mastodon posts are syndicated to other networks.
- Blog posting pipeline from my Joplin notebook out to the web.
- Home inference machine (mostly solar powered) I use for personal finance, automation, note search, and other sensitive AI tasks.
- Self-hosted calendar and contacts (separate VPS but same idea).
I don't log in to Google at all. With LLMs now it's very little work to build and maintain these things. Absolutely wild time to be a home tinkerer.
This!! There is no end to the side projects and idea lists, and all of them feel possible
Toggling users on/off also works great, and disabled users don't count towards the limit.
(sorry if this question doesn't make sense)
I've opened some of the data up to the public: cvrdb.dk for danish companies (working on granting users access to 'full' extracts of certain parts). ratemyaisite.com which is just a tiny subset of a larger project that I've dubbed commoncrawl-explore (cc-explore), which is run on a subdomain of my personal website, but purely for my own sake.
Making your own devex pleasant is the real game changer imho, not the VPS. I've made it easy for myself to deploy new projects using Dokploy (also tried Coolify).
I don't find the maintenance to be a problem - but part of that is not treating hobby projects as something that has to be enterprise-ready :)
tierhive.com has super cheap VPS, as low as 10 cents/month for a tiny one (128MB ram, 1GB SSD). ipv6 only, with a NAT proxy for ipv4 I think. It's quite possible to run a useful basic Debian server on that. I ran one with 32MB ram for a while.
I also run a few personal web services: Immich, Gitea, Bookstack, Jellyfin, and more. That cheap VPS couldn't handle it. I run the services on a computer in my home office. Caddy runs on the VPS with one proxy line per service. Data is, of course, exchanged via Yggdrasil. The domains for the various services all map to the VPS’s IP addresses. Caddy then handles the routing correctly. The system works simply. I can even run storage-intensive services like Jellyfin, and it only costs me a few euros for the VPS.
[0] https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/
Does it mean that the VPS has to be in-between all the traffic, or do we punch holes through the NAT for direct connections?
You’re going to get a lot of affirmative answers here, which is maybe what you’re looking for. Maybe you’re brainstorming.
But I’ll affirm what you’ve probably been thinking all along: It’s not worth it. I set up a Lenovo ThinkCentre to be my personal Linux server running on my home network. I could use it for backups, ssh, taskwarrior, etc. It did solve some problems.
It also creates problems. The biggest is that it’s another computer to maintain. It needs updates. Critically, it needs security. You need to secure the ports and services, use vpn, etc.
I found that none of the gains were worth the maintenance. For my problem set, it’s easier to keep multiple cheap laptops in multiple locations and use a flash drive (rather than network) to move data between them.
For backups, specialized cloud services (currently Arq going to B2) does the job better, along with Carbon Copy Cloner to a local volume.
For me, having to maintain and secure it was too much work. A vps may have been easier in some ways, but harder in others.
So in the end you may be right: just run things on your laptop.
Immich, Jellyfin, Gonic, Snapcast, Slskd, Audiobookshelf, Transmission, Automatic Ripping Machine, Vaultwarden, Frigate, Home Assistant, Actual Budget, Pocketbase, Vikunja, Forgejo, Readeck, Backrest/Restic, Gotify, Uptime Kuma, Homepage, Caddy, Shared network folder with spouse
I also run Cockpit and Beszel but don't use them often.
Router runs Adguard, Wireguard, and OpenVPN.
The only big memory guzzlers are generally proprietary software, like the unifi network controller software which basically requires an entire room of Cray supercomputers just to view your Wifi AP status.
I specifically look for efficient projects when I have a choice. Also most of my video media is in 720p. The 8 IP cameras I run in lower resolution as well, though that's mainly to avoid network bandwidth issues.
Honestly I have not run into any memory issues.
It’s definitely a way to get a competitive advantage over others that rely on more traditional architecture.
I dont know how much value there is to that, but i like having an apache server just running on the internet with a page on it. After all it is only $5
Its also useful in a pinch if i have to transfer files somewhere. upload with scp then download with http is easy, and i dont have to worry about third party services or anything.
(I'm familiar with and use them both, but have never bothered putting my personal GitHub page behind CF, I'm curious to see where other people get value from combining.)
As far as scaling, it's apache serving static html. Even on a $5 vps it would be incredibly difficult to saturate that.
Also sometimes i just want a host to try things on and experiment with.
I don't miss sshing into servers or using puppet, ansible, salt, chef.
Bro has a single server and ssh.
Meanwhile, i have been apt-get install'ing apache since i was a teenager, and it still all works the same.
One for personal self-hosted projects: languagetool, nextcloud, hister, syncthing, restic backups, vaultwarden, windmill.
Another for public facing web apps I host through cloudflare tunnels. As well as public facing friend tools like jellyfin via tailscale tunnels.
Everything on nixos with config repo that configs all of my machines with claude code. Restrict claude from executing `nixos-rebuild switch` and review each change before switching manually.
You placed the laptop in a location where slowly but surely there is a dust build up in the fans? You get some issues.
Hard drives start degrading? You get some issues.
And so on, while I've been running some personal things off VPSs too and those never had a single second of downtime. My home machine is my pride and joy but for sure 1 day a year on average there is something. But much cheaper in terms of raw components and performance.
So, yeah, it makes sense if you want the things you run not become a side job/hobby.
That being said, it's really fun and claude code on nixos is excellent rn at doing all the boring grunt work while letting you remain in the "grand architect" position. Lastly, it feels really nice to have personal compute you can trust and good future investment as compute is increasing in accessibility and risk so self-hosting is really popping off right now.
I just use a $10/yr VPS with one core, 1 GB RAM, and I forget how much storage. It's more than enough. None of my things need much storage, and if they did I could pull them over Tailscale from home.
Not quite a VPS, but I recently found a box of old single-board computers that were collecting dust: a RasPi Zero W, an MK802+, a DragonBoard, a BeagleBone, and some others. All pretty ancient and I wasn't super motivated to go scrounging for working Linux images. But Codex did a great job of building images for them and getting them running with minimal intervention. So now I have one running with the sole purpose of keeping a persistent tmux session going (with the terminals going to various other endpoints). I'll put the others to work in some similar way, probably.
Now the city got its act together and appointments are easy to find, but for a while it was very useful. I'm glad to say that this service is ready to be shut down.
https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/appointment-finder
- a micro community that a core group of people chat on every day
Both on what used to be digital ocean $5 droplets. Once I find the time and energy I will migrate everything away from DO, the price was raised but the quality and speed of their servers stayed the same.
[0]: https://docs.sailresearch.com/sailboxes
After getting into home assistant and setting up a proper home server I no longer saw a need to keep the VPS running. With cloudflare reverse proxy I can still host personal websites, but from inside my home network. Since getting the home server I'm discovering a lot of neat self hosted options and use it a lot more than I ever did the VPS. If nothing else, hosting your own stuff provides a great place to learn and explore. It doesn't have to be always on/on the internet for that to be true though.
- Tailscale exit nodes (I don't use them to stream Netflix or torrents over, but sometimes they're useful to browse "this content is not available in your region" sites, to use WhatsApp while transiting through Bejing airport, ...)
- Invidious
- FreshRSS.org
- Vaultwarden
- some silly scripts
I treat these as disposable and can spin them up again from daily backups if needed. So far the stability has been good as with more expensive infrastructure providers.
My home setup is not $5/month VPS but a sub $100 second hand thin client running KVM is used for: - Home Assistant
- Immich photo hosting
- Music Assistant
- Pihole
- Hister
- Invidious
Obviously the storage requirements for media and photos are higher, these go to a (more expensive) Synology NAS, and are backed up externally, but that's beyond the scope of this post. The Home Assistant + Pihole storage requirements are minimal.
- An old desktop running alpine that hosts two minecraft servers
- Another old desktop acting as a NAS. Currently planning on migrating that to a mini lenovo pc to reduce size and unify everything. I have a single HDD that I've split into partitions for projects and Linux ISOs, currently serving over samba. It also has a transmission client on it to download the Linux ISOs. Probably the most useful box on my network
- A mini lenovo PC that runs homeassistant, and in future will probably turn into my NAS, once I can find a good storage solution for it (Not much expandability inside the box itself, but it has some usb 3 ports. Id put my existing 3.5" HDD on a usb sata adapter, but they also need 12v. Currently looking into an NVME dock or multi-terabyte laptop SSDs)
- A raspberry pi that will, in future, run my website (currently still working on the software for it)
It also hosts e-books, primarily so I can load up the website in an ebook reader and download my own books, rather than worry about connecting my reader up via cable and so on.
Also when I'm out, and I find a maybe interesting book, I can check if I have it or (if the price is too high) add it to my wishlist. Similar for relatives who wish to buy me a book. I live in Asia but primarily read in English, so I do have to capitalize on opportunities to buy books when they arise.
It's open-source, I've been running it a few years, you can use it if you like. It runs on a potato, so your 5$ VPS will be able to host several other things at the same time:
https://github.com/seanboyce/ubiblio
File sharing, BitTorrent, and version control are my mainstay applications I've run on my servers over the years. File servers are out of trauma; I've lost too much data to trust software or hardware, and servers are the easiest way to configure stuff like RAID/ZFS as well as automated backups. BitTorrent on a server lets me be a good citizen and seed consistently. Version control right now is Forgejo, and given the nonsense at Github this is becoming a better decision by the day. There are also a number of support services like PostgreSQL and NGINX, with CRON powered backups to the fileserver.
Way way back when, I also did it to learn a bit more about daily *nix craft.
At home: truenas and gitlab.
At home, for work: I have an older HP workstation with an older Xeon with 24 physical cores and it runs a rhel (I have them for free as a partner) and I use it to run VMs for experiments and replicating infras, K8S, Windows AD stuff, etc.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightscout
The main apps I run are Actual Budget (YNAB alternative), Wallabag (read-it-later service), and FreshRSS (RSS aggregator).
I've also been using the VPS to run some scripts daily for my planet site(s): they ingest RSS feeds, regenerate the static site files, and push the files to my static site host (https://pgs.sh) instead of worrying about hosting them myself (threatening the VPS's apps).
- Cheap VPS is nice for electric & network reliability (mail servers, public facing website or webapp)
- local hosting is nice for price/control/internal tools (some git and maven, different tools)
The value of any VPS is what value it delivers in your daily life. Whether that's running your own VPN, mail server or just personal apps you build for yourself.
There was a phase where we ran lots of open source stuff. Now I think we'll just drop agents on these VMs and let them use it to build apps or browse the web.
Checking out a git repo in a Linux VM and hosting prod elsewhere (automatically deployed via a push to GitHub) seems like a nice pattern. Since exe.dev doesn’t charge anything to leave the dev machines running, I leave them running.
This is all new. I started using coding agents for development at the end of December and exe.dev looked like a nice way to try it out.
[1] https://skybrian-links.exe.xyz/ [2] https://pages.skybrian.com/
Any stories to share about setup or specific apps? I've heard freshRSS named as the way to go.
Single binary. Sqlite. Minimal UI. Perfect!
- Readeck (bookmarks)
- Traggo (time tracking)
- Joplin notes sync webdav server
- Cartomancer (GPX tracks)
And some other small personal tools. https://github.com/jo-m/fluffy/tree/main/fluffy
3x$5VPS: Garage S3 cluster for static sites and project builds, behind haproxy. Also runs Postgres w/ patroni and a small game server for a game I’m working on and some nameservers. My website is on all 3 VMs and has a little gimmick, where state is tracked between them.
3xOld MiniPC: Proxmox cluster for running Gitlab+Runners, monitoring vm, Valheim server, Syncthing, plus a couple of other odd projects. The oldest hw is probably close to 10 years old (NUC7) and the other two is refurbished Lenovo M710q I think, so nothing fancy.
Everything is connected- and communicate over Tailscale.
Things I like to host: Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, Karakeep, Deluge, Tailscale (for exit nodes, among other things)
Other stuff I want to host but not yet: Immich, Vaultwarden, Hister, Archibebox, CopyParty
I don't understand why you would need Tailscale, for example -- shouldn't your VPS have a static address to which you can reach out from your home and also connect remotely, making Tailscale superfluous?
- Lots of ISPs use CGNAT which means you can't always have direct access, especially on mobile. Tailscale solves that via DERP (https://tailscale.com/docs/reference/derp-servers)
- Static public IP addresses for ingress cost money from the cloud provider, they're not cheap either
- Having a public IP makes the ports open to attackers, using Tailscale the attacker has to hack your tailnet before they can hack your server
- You have to buy a DNS name for your public IP, you don't need one if you use Tailscale thanks to MagicDNS
- Tailscale has a bunch of nice features like Let's Encrypt integration, OAuth support, Tailscale SSH, etc. that make the experience quite nice overall
What are you talking about?
I am sure there is a way to avoid tailscale, but I like putting it on everything I can. It is pretty easy to use.
People underestimate just how much a $5 VPS can run, because they are using things written in Java, C#, Python, PHP, etc.
I had a $5 VPS once manage device is image downloads via HTTP, and had 100s of thousands of devices update themselves in a single night, with about 10k concurrent connections at peak.
That same instance later couldn't run a single Jenkins instance for a single project...
And it also runs a Home Assistant instance inside a docker container, and serves as an MQTT broker for my ESP devices. Everything is through a Cloudflare tunnel.
As for maintenance, your AI harness of choice combined with passwordless sudo (and a good backup system in case things go really south) can make upkeep very pleasant.
- my blog (ghost)
- an open source recipe saas
- a web based epub reader that saves current page and other state among browsers/devices
- A multi-player mexican-train domino in rust/Yjs
- A self made app i call "auto-SaaS": postgREST+empty page+AI Agent (clippy chat animation and all) that allows me to build ANY personal saas i need:
* simple aisle based supermarket shopping list (shared with my wife)
* note taking app that auto groups notes by date
* auto-scrolling news web page that I can read while stationary cycling in my tablet (AI summarized to de-editorialize)
* a battleship game! To play with someone when bored.
Among other minor stuff.
You might want to have a look at pocketbase. I use it as a backend for my vibecoded "auto-SaaS" Tools.
That, plus tailscale and Secure Shellfish on my iPhone and I can vibe code from anywhere.
[edit] I listen to a bunch of audiobooks, so Audiobookshelf.org
Jitsi instance is working all the time and ready to connect 24/7.
It depends on your use case, and ability to actually administrate it properly.
I do think about it sometimes when databases leak, though.
To be honest, I did use it as a sacrificial email account for a while, used to sign up for websites that weren't completely trustworthy back in the day.
The biggest VPS hosts my NYC subway times app, my personal website, and other tools I build (most recently my pottery project management tool [1]).
Then in addition I've a bunch of monitoring software. I also run a rollouts system that automatically rolls out new versions of my projects when the GitHub CI builds them.
It's a really interesting thing to do! The maintenance is kind of the point: you get to learn essentially how to build a prod deployment.
[0] https://github.com/jamespfennell/hoard [1] https://log-demo.unionpots.nyc/
I've been really happy after upgrading my home server from a Pi to a Beelink Mini a couple of years ago. Pays itself off pretty quickly once you factor in your subscription savings and you own the hardware, have very fast local streaming on your LAN and avoid having to trust yet another third party.
I do put most things on my home box (certainly can't put my media server data on $5 VPS!), but stuff like my XMPP server, websites, etc. that I want available even when my power or Internet goes out live on a VPS.
(That being said, I don't actually use a VPS, I just pay for SaaS apps for things I don't want to self-host for the reason above.)
What's the benefit of this over an unlisted YouTube video? I suppose there are many valid philosophical reasons to not want to use it.
I setup an old router on the home side so switching on the vpn is just changing the wifi.
The reason to use a $3 vps rather than a dedicated vpn: the dedicated vpn services get blocked since geoblocking knows the big vpn providers, they don’t always have a config for your routers supported vpn types which ai can setup for you in seconds, the dedicated server can do a ton more for you when you need it too (eg. All the other stuff listed here).
Makes sense for all the reasons you stated. Curious - would this have been doable for a non technical person pre LLM ?
I run a bunch of cheap (free?) custom apps for myself in the "serverless" or "cloud native" stuff in AWS. Everything else is on my NAS running on my home network (I see people mentioning qbittorrent, jellyfin, etc).
I stopped using cheap vps providers probably a decade ago, not a huge difference between a $5/mo cheap vps to a basic ec2 instance in pricing. And there were always issues with the cheap vps. Not to mention how easy it is to backup mediawiki + mysql in AWS vs having to spin up ANOTHER vps. Maybe there are cheap vps providers that offer object storage now, but I never bothered looking.
Using this, i can expose services on my home server without giving access to the internet to probe on it. I can host an immich server and not be afraid that someone can access it
(OpenBSD)
It intentionally runs like a guest order website, I think the only people so far who've really used it are the privacy geeks who also like mushroom spores and cultivation - niche clientele (but my kind of people).
Depending on how well this project goes, it's only a few days old - but it's taking orders, I'm hoping to move our main shop to a similar setup and running it from home because WP/Woo and even linux servers (I tend to use Debian) are giving me a lot of anxiety with the security situation. I fear that I worry about our customers data than even they do!
So I have a VPS running for thoses downloads and any that slow.
It's a $9 VPS instead of $5, mostly because of the storage, but if I ever truly need it, it'll be worth 50x the price.
I installed Plex but ended up not using it, so I removed it.
* https://www.langturbo.com
Costs a bit more than 5 bucks with a tb drive. But worth it to be always on and these consume little resources. All in one box.
I find it easier to try out the common tools here first and then decide if you need something bigger, heavier to move to a VPS or your own server.
Using VPN Provider is an option, but i prefer no one tinker with the VPN server i am using. Also i can add unlimited client to it.
1. All the VPN providers are blocked anyway
2. You have to disguise your traffic to look like non-VPN commercial traffic, anything that looks obviously like an outbound VPN gets blocked by the Great Firewall
Owning your email is nice, and save you sone bucks if you want family accounts.
All of those are in different containers running through podman.
Actual Budget - https://github.com/actualbudget/actual
AirTrail - https://github.com/johanohly/AirTrail
Beszel - https://github.com/henrygd/beszel
Coder - https://github.com/coder/coder
Crowdsec - https://github.com/crowdsecurity/crowdsec
Dawarich - https://github.com/Freika/dawarich
Dozzle - https://github.com/amir20/dozzle
Forgejo - https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo
Forgejo runner - https://code.forgejo.org/forgejo/runner
Grafana - https://github.com/grafana/grafana
Immich - https://github.com/immich-app/immich
Karakeeo - https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep
KitchenOwl - https://github.com/tombursch/kitchen owl
Loki - https://github.com/grafana/loki
Matrix - Tuwunel (https://github.com/matrix-construct/tuwunel) and cinny (https://github.com/cinnyapp/cinny)
memos - https://github.com/usememos/memos
Nourish - https://github.com/norish-recipes/norish
ntfy - https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy
oauth2-proxy - https://github.com/oauth2-proxy/oauth2-proxy
Outline - https://github.com/outline/outline
Paperless-ngx - https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx
Pingvin Share- https://github.com/stonith404/pingvin-share
Pixelfed - https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed
Pocket ID - https://github.com/pocket-id/pocket-id
Reitti - https://github.com/dedicatedcode/reitti
Signal CLI rest API - https://github.com/bbernhard/signal-cli-rest-api
Slink - https://github.com/andrii-kryvoviaz/slink
Ghost - personal music blog
Traefik - https://github.com/traefik/traefik
Umami - https://github.com/umami-software/umami
Uptime Kuma - https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma
Vikunja - https://github.com/go-vikunja/vikunja
wg-easy - https://github.com/wg-easy/wg-easy
ZeroByte - https://github.com/nicotsx/zerobyte
I used to run a couple of Hugo blogs but I've ended up moving them to bunny.
https://almeidapaulopt.github.io/tsdproxy/
I self-host plenty at home, but most are things that are mainly needed at home like Jellyfin, however that's available to others via the NAT/firewall/Traefik, but other things stay inside the FW since I don't need to access them from the outside.
Racknerd looked to be the preferred option after Hetzner raised their prices based on reading some of the forums/reddit.
I ended up going with "Server Host" based on ram and price. 4gb ram, 28 dollars for the year, and renews annually for that price (no discount expiring games). They initially provisioned it in the wrong region, I sent a support ticket in, and they fixed it same day. So far, so good.
I found it on lowendbox. It took me a minute to get past the gimmicky stuff. https://lowendbox.com/blog/serverhost-halloween-2026/
https://www.racknerd.com/specials/
Having a WebDAV enabled a server that can generate thumbnails for photos, allow browsing through them, serve as an audio and video player, and also acts as a markdown and note-taking server has been immensely valuable. I write several apps that can write themselves back to the server over WebDAV sort of like tiddlywiki, so the overall combination has been extremely useful.
I hope to do more, AI coding allowed me to do a lot of stuff I had been putting off for lack of energy.
https://github.com/pkulak/barnaby-home
I have a separate $20 vps I use for a honeypot with an old domain that was one of the hardcoded control servers for stuxnet.
My primary use case is to be able to use [dumbthingiwanttoshare].mydomain.tld without having to touch DNS records. The VPS has a static IP; I often don't.
Recently I moved everything to nixos with the help of Claude, It did everything.
Remote server has real differences that I couldn't learn from a bunch of local machines. Oh and it's quite different from AWS/etc.
Host bitwarden and gitea which are useful too.
I also have another one of a similar price coloated in Luxembourg, for reasons which are legal in Luxembourg.
I vibecoded a diary + life statistics/metrics web app, another one that shows me public transport I care about, etc.
Half of the fun was setting all of this up. Learning terraform, kubernetes, helm, lgtm observability stack, https, vibecoding…
I can also use this to show that I am a “total stack” A-Z developer.
Caveat: almost all of them only listen on a Tailscale network interface, so they are not directly exposed to the Internet.
Xray proxy so my BYO phone can get to the internet through work's BYO wifi.
HTTPS so I can share screenshots, images and files without relying on some other schmuck's computer.
I run a private Matrix server using conduit. It has about ten active users.
- Jellyfin
- Audiobook shelf
- Immich
- ChangeDetection (for monitoring when something is back in stock)
- Minecraft server for my kids
- Several apps I have for my own use
- HomeAssistant
- Hermes
Their backend is just a json file, which I GET and PUT with Nginx + WebDav + Basic Auth
(Netflix caps you at 720p to prevent you pirating it)
Before using VPSes, I hosted from my home IP directly. This has serious privacy downsides: from your IP address, it’s mostly trivial to find out who you are (e.g., by seeing your IP has port 443 open and checking the domain names of your TLS certificates), and from your domain name, it’s trivial to find out where you live (by way of the ISP whose IP address your domain points to). Using a VPN for general browsing helps with the first point but not the second. There’s also the threat of DDOS (if your server gets attacked you lose access to the Internet entirely, and then you’re really in trouble). Also, residential ISPs are rare and people who need a static IP (or even a non‐CGNAT IP) are not reliably catered to; VPS companies have plenty of competition and having a publicly accessible IP address is the default.
Once I started running VPSes, I ran many services directly on the VPS. Over the years, I’ve migrated everything to physical hardware in my house (or a secure offsite location), for privacy and performance reasons. I can add as much storage and RAM as I want. Incoming connections are port‐forwarded over WireGuard to my LAN, so the VPS provider can only gather metadata from encrypted connections. Unfortunately the game servers mostly don’t support TLS; I’d prefer to hide them behind a VPN, but that would be too difficult for the players.
I actually use three VPSes, each in a different datacenter. VPS downtime (that’s not caused by me) is pretty rare, but happens periodically, and is almost entirely due to maintenance being performed in the datacenter. Email and DNS both support redundancy.
My VPSes are from different providers, too. One time an OS bug caused high CPU usage for an extended time, and the provider nearly terminated my account on suspicion of crypto mining. If a particular company ever drops me or goes out of business, I can just change a few DNS records and firewall rules and be back in business.
The vast majority of my downtime has been from power outages at home and the residential ISP going down (it's crazy how often that happens, I had no idea until I started measuring it). So I got a second residential ISP. If one route goes down, the VPSes port forward over the other, or over a third route to my offsite LAN.
Each service runs in a separate VM. Some might consider that overkill, but I like how simple it is to move VMs between hosts. Services run as unprivileged non‐root users with no ability to initiate outgoing connections.
Services for which I’m the only user stay entirely within the LAN. I do have extrnal access to the LAN, three ways: WireGuard, SSH, and HTTP proxy. The proxy is a last resort, but it’s been a lifesaver when I was stuck for a week at a conference whose wifi blocked SSH and WireGuard (in fact, everything but HTTPS and DNS).
Pretty low maintenance overall - I can go months without even thinking about it.
One friend was running a gitlab runner on a laptop but moved to tarvis given how easy it is. Tarvis has a catalog of 750 apps already so I am sure you can find a few things from there to run 24/7.
IMO being able to see all the apps in a catalog and being able to easily add that app and experiment helped me figure out which apps I should be running.
( my post-factum inspiration: https://stevehanov.ca/blog/how-i-run-multiple-10k-mrr-compan... )
my workloads are suited to serverless platforms like Cloudflare.
Local classifier models that run and train on CPU, GitHub: https://github.com/nicobrenner/jeffy
Handy to have a non commercial VPN solution you can deploy in any region.
2. Rendezvous server ("supernode")
Just spending thinking juice on whether you should spend 5$/mo on a server is already a huge issue, just do it and in general increase your investment in proffessional tooling.
And it proxies Jellyfin, navidrome, audiobookshelf, romm, homeassistant, and immich.
I provide the ports via a ssh port forward per service, from the app servers. Auto-reestablishes on internal IP change or tunnel breaks.
Its 0 touch.
I use mine as basically an open test server I can play with
The price was low enough that I left it running.
Proxmox VE with various guests (PeaNUT, Gitea, Ntfy, n8n, AI inference, agents) running across 3 servers (total >300GB RAM, 6TB SSD storage), with a separate Proxmox Backup server.
I can't qualify for the $5 here, but:
I have a bunch of them what faciliate the needs to access the network resources what block my $default connection.
I'm running my own NS on them and this is always a question if does really worth it - but it works for me, including hosting a dozen of domains and not being depended on any 3rd party, including the bills and their web interfaces, along with tge security shenanigans[0].
There is Forgejo, Syncthing relay, Syncthing client and a file server for the most important things.
Formerly there was a NextCloud instance as a gateway to access the before mentioned fileserver.
Zabbix server never made it to a rented monitoring service but it is still warns me about the problems way before even the $job one does.
Oh, I'm running docker-mailserver which backups my mail from a couple accounts I do have.
[0] I do have and had services what locked out me of my accounts for my security. It's quite a sad experience.
(I realize a VPS at a hosting provider is still at the mercy of said provider, of course.)
PS:
> DHH's "AI shed" idea got me thinking
Here's some free advice: stop listening to xenophobic, racewar-encouraging pigs like DHH.
There's plenty of non-terrible humans that can advice you on VPSs.
For as the primary functionality of your local computer is as a desktop then you do indeed need to be running a server(be it a VPS, dedicated server or whatever).
Otherwise, then I would ask the question? What do you use your local computer for? Playing games? Sounds childish
The bottomline will remain, there's functionality you can get from a $5/month VPS that you can never get out of a desktop. Do I really need to list them? Probably not because they're too obvious. I mean, a server gives you access to the internet.
But, anyways, I forget servers are not useful anymore because we have all move to the AI protocol :-)