I have so much personal automation and small web apps running on my VPS, laptop, and on my phone it's hard to know where to start.
- 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.
My setup is a bit over the top, but I like tinkering and build a lot of odd projects:
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.
I vibe code a lot of little projects. Specialized calculators (math, programming, electronics, etc.), an SVG maker for my laser cutter, a blueprint explorer for my condo, various little graphics projects (visualizers for space, math, physics, etc.), games, and so on. I made a little tool to publish these to a subdomain with the ability to selectively make them public or available only via my Tailnet. I also host an LLM and some things at home that the VPS can access if it needs.
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.
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 ask an LLM to set up a wireguard network for you with an idempotent bash script to deploy everything. You'll need a $5 VPS to bounce everything through. Works an absolute treat.
I picked up a new hobby of buying Linux ISOs from thrift stores. I usually get them for $1/each. Up to 300 now - all mine. Jellyfin is great to organize them
I have some Linux ISOs I ripped myself, but it can be especially hard to find older ISOs from other countries - you usually can't find them on normal websites. It's really nice to have them on my own server and not worry about them disappearing someday.
Blu rays aren't bad either. The glory days were back when Netflix was cheap and there was an oversupply (in that era I built up a library of hundreds), but even today you can get most things in 1080p for $10 or less.
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.
The two things that torrents are best at are downloading Linux ISOs and pirating content. So using qbittorrent to download Linux ISOs is usually code for piracy, since torrenting Linux ISOs is legal and piracy is not :)
I am honestly not sure. I use GG photo because that what i use first and i was too lazy to investigate better deal. Also, i know Google does really well at keeping my data available, which is what you want for backup.
I have an encrypted offsite backup. A lot of people I know with home servers work out a deal with a family member to have cross-backups with each other.
Sadly I don’t have a family member that I can trust with that, but I do put an encrypted copy on AWS glacier and I have an encrypted volume in Dropbox.
You lost me with the quotes. Why are Linux ISOs needing such broad distribution that mirrors won't handle? Those mirrors might be on full self driving cars taking people to the movies or a concert, right?
Like I said, this is on an old desktop PC that I shoved some spare SSDs into. I have a few thousand Linux ISOs on there. I have an rclone job running regular encrypted offsite backups as well, so that my Linux ISOs are safe from hardware issues.
They're compressed in x265, most web browsers can decompress that natively ;) Heck, when you watch something on YouTube you are decompressing the content ont he fly
I have a similar amount running on a 16GB NUC in proxmox LXCs and it usually sits at less than half memory usage.
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 host a searchable database of my physical books so that family and friends can search what I've got. Also if they run the same software, I can authorize their instance to work with a primitive inter-library search feature (their library has a public key and signs their request). Fun for book clubs!
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:
By my standards (lowendspirit.com) $5/month is kind of high end for a VPS. I have a small personal web site on a $4 per year VPS. Other than that I have another VPS (I think around $7/m with 500GB of HDD) that I use as a personal storage server and git repo since its internet connection is much faster than my home one, etc. For a while I ran some monitoring tasks on VPSes, though I don't have any active right now.
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.
It was a promo from Virmach.com. They offer stuff like that around black friday. I've had it for years. You can run a website on v6 NAT though. v6 providers like Tierhive use HAProxy to forward your traffic from v4 port 80 to your v6. You can also just set up an AAAA record and run a pure v6 website. That would probably work fine for my super low traffic thing.
I don't know. Maybe I'll look into it sometime. I think I'd just use v6, or NAT with http/2. If you really need v4 you can still do it pretty cheap. Look on lowendspirit.com.
It’s a forum for low end providers. You’re dealing with largely unheard of providers often with seemingly impossibly low prices, so you have to wonder if quoted specs are real (yeah before anyone tells me, the “reputable” flat rate providers are also oversubscribed), whether they’ll disappear on moment’s notice or without notice, whether you can trust your data with them, etc.
lowendtalk is shady in its own right (long story). lowendspirit is sort of a fork of it and is much better. hostballs.com is another one of those, still around but much slower.
I'm surprised that so far nobody has mentioned using one for a password store. The 'pass' utility has git integration and encourages you to have a git remote somewhere to host a duplicate of your encrypted store. For over a decade I have had a cloud VM costing a few cents a month to do this.
Well the passwords are GPG encrypted, so they'd need your private key too, not just breach the server.
What sites you have accounts on is visible though.
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.
right, but curious why not use github + cloudflare pages = totally free and far better infrastructure/scaling. Also for file transfers, there's wormhole (which also handles huge files)
Not GP, but I also run a cheap VPS to host my personal website. I don't want to depend on GitHub or Cloudflare. I don't need better infrastructure or scaling, and $5 is ~0.03% of my monthly salary, which is indistinguishable from free. What benefit is there to using a more complicated platform to host a simple website?
which is fine if you have good reasons not to depend on them (you can actually do the same kind of thing with a bunch of things) and somehow depend on whoever provides your cheap VPS instead? I have a VPS as well for bots (digital ocean), though VPS hosts containers and the containers run the bots. A decade or so ago I used VPS for websites, but now it seems a lot simpler using things like cloudflare. Thing about websites on little VPS's you have to be more concerned about patching/security etc which you can mostly automate but really need alerting then for when it goes wrong. Which all seems way more hassle.
Pre-llm I'd say it can be more undertaking than most people care to take to move to "serverless" or "cloud native" tech. But now it's probably worth taking a crack at it.
I don't miss sshing into servers or using puppet, ansible, salt, chef.
honestly I would rather not have a personal website than be beholden to some big company to host it and have to worry about what random crap they would pull via some flaky automated ToS enforcement.
what difference does that make? if you have to install 3 different things, same difference. There is no real burden in using 2 services, weird way to evaluate it. FYI wormhole is just a program https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole
I've been self-hosting since 1999---first with a co-located server (perks of working at a small web hosting company) and now with a VPS. I host not only my own email and web site, but also DNS, SSH, gopher, gemini, and qotd. It's not as much work as you might think. But what works for me might not work for others.
Same, since 1999. My thoughts are if you did all this stuff before it got cloudy out, it’s already a routine that’s second nature/familiar and switching actually looks way more of an undertaking with way more risks. I could see how those coming to it later just became cloud native in a sense and never did the full admin stuff, so it looks equally risky, cumbersome and laborious
My email (postfix and dovecot), my personal website (nginx, traefik, and various apps I've written), my IRC web client (thelounge), and git repositories (gitolite) all comfortably run in 1gb of ram. Sadly it isn't enough for GitLab, but I've been meaning to attempt Gitea on it.
Yeah i just tried self-hosting GitLab again and was surprised that I was getting OOM errors when I provisioned it with an 6GB memory limit. Turns out 8GB is like, the bare minimum. Crazy
Try gitea. It's super lightweight and feels and looks very similar to gitlab. I did not benchmark but it feels like it needs 10% of ram and cpu of gitlab requirements. It's great.
A simple subway arrival time web page for me and a few of my neighbors showing past headways, predicted next trains based on simple regression, and any alerts. The problem this solves is is we live just 2 stops from a terminus station so that the official subway API predictions start just 2-3 minutes out, when a new train leaves that terminus.
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.
A slave/secondary authoritative DNS server for ~80 domains, a third-tier backup MX for ~20 domains with about 75 users, and a place to put some "Oh Shit" encrypted backup files that get sent there about once every 10 days.
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.
They're not all mine (though maybe too many of them are). Most of them are personal domains of mine or friends of mine, and at least half of them are little more than a landing page (or resume) and MX records pointing at gmail or proton.
I recently closed down a VPS I had been running for the last 10 years. Mostly used it for hosting a personal website and some smaller other static sites, as well as git repo backups.
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.
I went a bit over the top and hired a fully remote dev environment in hetzner. I connect to it using rayfish.xyz and I dont have to carry a big-ass laptop like I used to. I just have Mac Air. The whole setup is Mac Studio at home for heavy stuff, Mac Air to travel and hetzner machine 300 usd a month for heavy devving.
I use such a computer to expose services from my home server. You can do this using tailscale or even rathole. (Sadly, I don't have access to the router to port forward packets to my home server directly.)
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?
- 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
I pay $2.03/month and ran seven theatre company sites including ticketing, five restaurants with online ordering, and my personal site with FreeBSD including email.
I'm curious what you use for the ticketing. Theater has pretty specific requirements, to allow customers to see the theater layout and choose their preferred seats.
I started out "self-hosting" by paying for self-hosted app instances on PikaPods, but then I learned could get a $5 VPS and run most of the same apps there for less cost overall per month while knowing very little about how it all works (using CapRover on a DigitalOcean VPS).
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).
A vpn to my home country to get around geoblocking. The best television there is the public broadcaster and free to stream but geoblocked outside Australia.
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).
I use a $5 VPS + $3 for 0.5gb of block storage to host shitty video game clips I want to share with my friends. Soon I'm going to see if I can stack some google photos alternative on top of that without it giving up. I also use it as a vpn endpoint and a gateway to expose access to a minecraft server that dynamically provisions a an AWS machine and turns on only when someone tries to connect to the VPS' IP. The last one has probably already saved me hundreds of dollars that I would otherwise pay for a dedicated machine to run a server on 24/7 even if none of my friends are playing on it.
Long time Linode user here. I have been running the same $5 VM for over a decade now with them, maybe even 15 years, would have to check... I used to host Wordpress websites on it but now it only runs my own RSS reader (running background jobs to ingest the feeds).
I'm a type-1 diabetic. I'm running Nightscout[0] on my VPS so I can sync my blood sugar from my glucose monitor to my pebble watch. Only took an hour or so to set up with the help of a coding agent.
I have 11 VM’s running on exe.dev for $20/month. There’s one I use every day for my links website [1] and the rest are mostly-idle development machines. One of them has the git worktree and preview website for a static website that’s hosted on Netlify. [2]
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.
I run AdGuard, FreshRSS, and that kind of thing. NextCloud. It also has a script to send a wake-on-lan command to my media PC which has Jellyfin, Navidrome, and Steam streaming. Lots of little toy personal web apps too.
I do all my AI assisted development on my $10/mo Racknerd box. I don't use herdr, maybe I should, but a 20-minute vibe-coded tmux visor is more than I need for keeping track of multiple lanes of development and letting them run autonomously. I also wired up some pi skills to let them send me emails if they're blocked or have questions, etc.
That, plus tailscale and Secure Shellfish on my iPhone and I can vibe code from anywhere.
This is also common for people inside China who need to access external internet because:
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
I have 3 VPSs so that I can run redundant copies of the data scraping software I wrote [0]. I've been scraping NYC subway data for 5+ years.
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.
I run a wekan kanban board for household stuff. If I had any servers up 24/7 in the house I'd run them there, but it's handy to be able to access from anywhere and well worth the $5.
I'm a Spanish teacher that creates a LOT of content in Canvas (the LMS) and I run a website where I share some free tools/scripts I made for myself that help me work with Canvas more efficiently. It runs beautifully 24/7 on a $5 VPS but, admittedly, being such a very niche area, the site gets very little traffic. Still, I'm very grateful for those inexpensive options whenever I have an idea for some app or tool and want to make it available to others!
I use the free-tier Oracle server, but: Nextcloud. Minecraft server. I will probably move my Joplin and Wallabag hosting there soon, currently paying for both. I tried running a Valheim server there, but ran into bugs emulating it with FEX, unfortunately.
I have a 8€ storage VPS from Alpha VPS. It's far from a beefy machine. Hosting it for a few years so far. It has a blog generated with Hugo, WireGuard Easy VPN for me and my friends, Forgejo for a few small repos, SFTPGo for files. Even VPN hosting itself saves me and my friend maybe around 50$ a month. Maintenance is easy, and even easier after AI. Definitely worth it.
I was hoping to hear peoples justifications for a VPS over a mini PC.
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.
Mini PC is great for private/tailscale use. If you have a mini PC or rpi open to the public internet, you need to worry about the "vulnpocalypse" pwning your whole LAN and every machine on it.
Yep, I have a decently powerful home server that's always on, but still run a cheap VPS for directly public services like my sites.
I don't think it's particularly likely that the home server would get hacked if updates were to br kept up with, but why risk it for that little money?
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.
I don't use any cheap VPS providers. Everything is in AWS for me. I do run a single small ec2 instance ($8/mo?) that runs a personal mediawiki and a game server (for some multiplayer games I made).
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.
* Mirror my Github repos (in case GH goes down or closes my account)
* Serve my small website (just HTML files using Nginx)
* Monitor other applications (and hits a URL when they fail)
* Occasionally use it as a WeTransfer alternative (just uploading files into the WWW directory with an obscure name)
Jitsi meet instance running on cheap VPS saves me tons of headaches. My country is adopting censorship/monitoring/firewall restrictions akin to China and Iran. Half of services work with VPN for other half you have to disable it.
Jitsi instance is working all the time and ready to connect 24/7.
I wanted to do this but I found it hard to secure it in a way that anyone can join meeting links I send but I'm the only one who can create meetings. It seems like Jitsi intentionally makes this hard so that you buy their hosted plan instead. Have you found a good solution?
dns and email server. i just make aliases that point to a single imap account that is unique for everything i sign up for. if i start to get spam, turn off the alias. it also lets me see who is selling my info or has been hacked when bestbuy@example.com starts getting emails from russia.
I've built email servers that sent 15 million emails a day into all of the major inbox providers, so you could say I know a thing or two about it. This wasn't spam, it was legit doubple-opt in.
It depends on your use case, and ability to actually administrate it properly.
I had an abandoned ISP email account dating to the 90's that I used before I sold my soul to Google. Out of curiosity, I resurrected it, last year, and sure enough, it has been chunking away receiving about 400 spam email messages a day.
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.
why VPS, if you have a computer/laptop collecting dust, onboard to kubehub.io, there you have personal cloud with access to all sorts of apps that already runs on kubernetes.
Mini PC w/ tailscale. Codex to handle scheduled tasks. I also mosh in a lot to run one-off tasks with codex/OMP/opencode. Some containers sometimes for trying out things but never had a need for anything long-term.
I repurposed my old macbook pro from 2013 as dedicated Proxmox machine. I run all short of application on it - mostly pulled from https://community-scripts.org/. Along this, I use free tier of Oracle VM to funnel traffic to my box and use that as reverse proxy appliance. Thee isn't a real need to pay $5-$10 for a VPS if you have old machine lying around and use AI to help you configure it. I gave my setup using whichever LLM model I want to use at that day full access via SSH keys.
We're running a no-JS, no account, no cookies online shop for selling mushroom products. $5 a month VPS server, but takes hardly any resources so it works.
That sounds pretty cool and even in the spirit of OpenBSD a little. Is it just plain HTML, POST forms, something simple on the backend to collect the orders, etc.?
Hi there, it's plain HTML with the basket living in the URL. Checkout and contact form are POST. There's a small Go backend (pledge/unveil) which saves the orders as encrypted json files (public key) with no private key stored on the server, then a program on my laptop which SSHes in to the VPS to collect the orders and delete the orders on the server multiple times a day - it's a passion project away from our bigger shop to try creating something more secure and private than wordpress/woo.
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!
This is very cool! What do you use for payment processing? Also what’s the site it love to check it out. Not really into mushrooms but I love a good hand made ecommerce site!
I host my server for the translations of latin inscriptions https://new.roman-names.com on one and it does a fine job. It even held up to HN traffic a few weeks back thru cloudflare.
I run a language learning app* on a single VPS, for free.
I'm not sure if you can still get it, but Oracle used to offer very generous VPS for free. I have a 4 CPUs, 24 GB memory VPS that I'm using for several things, including running the backend and the marketing site for that app.
I installed Plex but ended up not using it, so I removed it.
I run Caddy on a $4/mo VPS that's totally overkill for what it does.
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.
A few telegram bots that handle my daily schedule and workout planning, my personal website, a personal AnkiWeb server, a language learning tool that aggregates data between LingQ and Anki, a syncthing server, might be forgetting something.
I hope to do more, AI coding allowed me to do a lot of stuff I had been putting off for lack of energy.
Curious, what hosted VPS services people are using these days. I am using hostinger, but I don't intend to continue as 63%-70% discount eventually runs out. Then the real cost hits. Its the lock-in and migration costs that make people shell out the uncomfortable renewal price. Looking for an affordable option without the introductory rug-pull.
I just bought my first VPS plan after deciding not to renew my shared hosting contract.
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 have used racknerd for years - no fancy features like a real cloud provider, but you get a stable VM for very competitive prices, and they're not super overprovisioned like some cheap providers
Things I use from home and away, two main things: Vikunja https://vikunja.io/ - todo list manager, I use it on all my computers, and phone // Websites - various personal, and work websites that I need up 24/7.
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.
I host about a dozen services across my home lab and my VPS, but CopyParty takes the cake.
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.
Here are a few things I do:
Host static content behind nginx
Run filestash as a partial GoogleDrive replacement (I use it for sharing files with other people, like deliverables), files place on an S3 compatible object store.
Run vaultwarder for myself and some family members.
Run a container registry service backed by an s3 compatible object store.
Run a django web application I wrote for my own use. However, it stores to postgresql running in a different VPS.
Run caddy for ssl termination and reverse proxying the other services running here.
Redis (I forget if that was for filestash or the container registry, but can be configured to be very light weight).
All of those are in different containers running through podman.
I was running my TrackMania 2 community server on one, but decided to self-host it on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 after discovering that an Ethernet adapter existed for it.
On no so mini pc, plex, backups, mini apps that I build for my self, GitHub runners, homeassistant... Google photos bot yet, I am worry about Who Will manage It if I die and my family would lost all the pictures, maybe if someday one of my kids get interested in IT...
Recently I moved everything to nixos with the help of Claude, It did everything.
I developed tarvis.io which is being used by friends and family to self host notion alternative and run hermes agents. This let's them run self hosted apps as actual apps without having to worry about the server or setups.
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.
I remember buying a lifetime VPS that was listed on LowEndBox for like $20. Can't remember the spec and I guess a lifetime means 5 years, but I couldn't complain for $20
My own vibe-coded replacements for services that I formerly paid a subscription for, for services that need the best latency or uptimes. Also, I have a couple physical Linux boxes with other services running for stuff less latency sensitive or that require much more RAM and storage.
Caveat: almost all of them only listen on a Tailscale network interface, so they are not directly exposed to the Internet.
Messaging queues and brokers. RabbitMQ, BullMQ, etc. Simple services, but I've learned to keep them on their own images so they recover fast and don't compete with other resources.
I keep moose os instance on a vps, for immich, cap (recordings), cal for meetings and one app for notes.
Small productivity apps that I just like to have access to everywhere.
Fun little single serve websites and side projects. Built a little graffiti wall a few years back which runs on my VPS and requires basically no attention.
A computer professional should have at least 1 vps online 24/7 in the same way a plumber should have a wrench.
Just spending thinking juice on whether you should spend 5$/mo on a server is already a huge issue, just do it and in general increase your investment in proffessional tooling.
I've seen too many chat services go away, or behind a paywall, so I vibe-coded my own chat and use the VPS to host the hole-punching infrastructure, because I and my friend who I wish to chat with are both behind NAT.
I have a small VPS on which I run a Discord bot for my friends, as well as an NTP server that is part of the pool. It also serves some light web traffic (my Fossil repos, not that anyone really cares).
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 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.
Honestly, for me it's having an always-reachable place on the internet that I control. It's somewhere I can ssh to and write a note. It's somewhere I can proxy to to get around geoblocking. But most importantly, it's my place on the otherwise terrible internet.
(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.
- 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.
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.
- 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.
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.
- 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.”
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.
Ask yourself what other types of media can be had on popular torrent sites.
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).
It is generous of you to share your "Linux ISOs" with your family and friends.
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/
- 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
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
- 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
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).
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.
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).
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.
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!
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightscout
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/
That, plus tailscale and Secure Shellfish on my iPhone and I can vibe code from anywhere.
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
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.
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.
https://github.com/pkulak/barnaby-home
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.
https://almeidapaulopt.github.io/tsdproxy/
(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!
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 have a separate $20 vps I use for a honeypot with an old domain that was one of the hardcoded control servers for stuxnet.
I installed Plex but ended up not using it, so I removed it.
* https://www.langturbo.com
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.
Host bitwarden and gitea which are useful too.
I hope to do more, AI coding allowed me to do a lot of stuff I had been putting off for lack of energy.
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/
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.
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.
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 also have another one of a similar price coloated in Luxembourg, for reasons which are legal in Luxembourg.
All of those are in different containers running through podman.
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.
Recently I moved everything to nixos with the help of Claude, It did everything.
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.
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.
Their backend is just a json file, which I GET and PUT with Nginx + WebDav + Basic Auth
Caveat: almost all of them only listen on a Tailscale network interface, so they are not directly exposed to the Internet.
(Netflix caps you at 720p to prevent you pirating it)
- 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
Pretty low maintenance overall - I can go months without even thinking about it.
my workloads are suited to serverless platforms like Cloudflare.
Local classifier models that run and train on CPU, GitHub: https://github.com/nicobrenner/jeffy
( my post-factum inspiration: https://stevehanov.ca/blog/how-i-run-multiple-10k-mrr-compan... )
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.
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.
Handy to have a non commercial VPN solution you can deploy in any region.
2. Rendezvous server ("supernode")
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.