- 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.
Lammy 7 hours ago [-]
> - Tailscale so me, my family and friends
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.”
efficax 6 hours ago [-]
o no, they’re seeing open and close events between my laptop and my vps and database. the fbi will surely bring the hammer down on me
ehe78qhe 6 hours ago [-]
i literally do not care about that metadata
Lammy 2 hours ago [-]
Sad
ehe78qhe 1 hours ago [-]
Why? It's TCP/UDP connection data for troubleshooting you can turn off. No privacy issue there.
traceroute66 46 minutes ago [-]
> connection data for troubleshooting you can turn off. No privacy issue there.
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:
- "Tailscale US Inc., a Delaware corporation with registered address at 447 Sutter St Ste 405 #543, San Francisco, CA 94108, USA"
- "For any dispute not subject to arbitration you and Tailscale agree to submit to the personal and exclusive jurisdiction of and venue in the federal and state courts located in New York, NY".
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.
serf 6 hours ago [-]
good alternatives that do near the same thing?
jjordan 6 hours ago [-]
self-hosted open source alternative Headscale/Headplane. Uses the Tailscale client without their SaaS being involved.
cls59 3 hours ago [-]
Same! Although, for Headplane you may need at least 1GB of RAM.
Headscale turns the $5 VPS into the thing that connects my laptop to my other compute resources while I am out and about.
stavros 2 hours ago [-]
How do you know their client won't send them the metadata anyway?
ErroneousBosh 2 hours ago [-]
What's the advantage of Tailscale anyway? I guess ease of use compared to say setting up IPSEC? I haven't played with it yet but from what I read it's just wireguard with a bit of proprietary "one click and sell your soul" magic around it?
cls59 2 hours ago [-]
Tailscale automates wireguard key distribution and then layers routing, DNS, network ACLs, and other niceties on top.
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`.
chr15m 6 hours ago [-]
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.
tommica 4 hours ago [-]
Is that the prompt you would use, or is there more to it?
chr15m 2 hours ago [-]
You could try with that as a prompt. I have a repo set up with all of my sysadmin scripts and so the LLM had that as additional context.
beepbooptheory 4 hours ago [-]
The wireguard docs are pretty good, and it's probably worth it at least a little to actually understand what it does.
Yep and the LLM can help explain, but it is actually super straightforward. Public key cryptography and the text file configs are tiny.
mtrovo 1 hours ago [-]
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SturgeonsLaw 5 hours ago [-]
Netbird has a self hosted option
6 hours ago [-]
jotato 2 days ago [-]
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
ehe78qhe 2 days ago [-]
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.
eloisius 4 hours ago [-]
I’ve been collecting a lot of post-war Italian neorealism Linux ISOs and running a DHT indexer has made it pretty easy to find distros that may be out of print.
13 hours ago [-]
bambax 57 minutes ago [-]
In France many public libraries let you rent them for free (or a ridiculously low annual subscription); you take them home, copy them, return them, and it costs nothing.
satvikpendem 8 hours ago [-]
Problem is the resolution. I don't want to experience paid 480p in a world of free 4k.
Arainach 7 hours ago [-]
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.
Peacefulz 2 hours ago [-]
I'm back in to collecting physical media as well. I get my wife to use her Facebook account to find stuff on marketplace. Lightly used bundles can get movies down to like a dollar per.
xrd 3 hours ago [-]
What kind of thrift store sells these? In what country?
achenet 3 hours ago [-]
I suspect "Linux ISOs" are not actual Linux .iso images but ~pirated~ movies, music, and digital books ;)
easyThrowaway 2 hours ago [-]
Joking aside, a few early commercial Linux distro (Red Hat, Yellow Dog, SuSe, Corel Linux) had really nice packaging and media artworks. I'd love to collect them.
tomekw 3 hours ago [-]
No way!
ozozozd 9 hours ago [-]
Thrift stores? Really?
AndrewKemendo 9 hours ago [-]
Yes there’s usually a good cache for very cheap though most are scratched up
mewse-hn 9 hours ago [-]
psst, they're talking about movies
sreekanth67 8 hours ago [-]
is this an internet secret code I am missing ?
selcuka 3 hours ago [-]
It's even in the Urban Dictionary [1]:
> Linux ISO: A codeword for copyrighted material shared without permission, usually over P2P networks.
Ask yourself what other types of media can be had on popular torrent sites.
wyre 7 hours ago [-]
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 :)
NDlurker 5 hours ago [-]
Piracy is legal if you're big enough
jawns 10 hours ago [-]
In my neck of the woods "Linux ISOs" is a euphemism for porn.
It is generous of you to share your "Linux ISOs" with your family and friends.
PetahNZ 10 hours ago [-]
"Linux ISOs" is just anything pirated in general.
procinct 10 hours ago [-]
I’ve usually heard it as a euphemism for torrents specifically, since these would be one of the main legal uses of torrents.
bambax 57 minutes ago [-]
First time I heard this. When did it start? It's pretty funny.
bentley 29 minutes ago [-]
Very common on Slashdot fifteen or twenty years ago. The Pirate Bay trial was a big story back then, for instance, and there was advocacy from the copyright cartels to ban the bittorrent protocol. Another hot story was when Comcast dropped customers for using too much data despite being on “unlimited” plans, justified because only a pirate would download so much. Hence, “You can’t do that, I use bittorrent to download my Linux ISOs!”
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.
MrMorden 9 hours ago [-]
All my Linux ISOs are actually FreeBSD.
singingtoday 4 hours ago [-]
Mine are temple OS
mrtree 8 hours ago [-]
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9 hours ago [-]
jedberg 11 hours ago [-]
> Self hosting my photo albums
I used to do this, until I learned the value of offsite backups.
Learn from my mistake (if you aren't already :) ).
mrheosuper 7 hours ago [-]
That's why you always practice 3-2-1 with important data.
My photos are on: Captured devices(phones, camera). Immich on my homelab, and google photo(which is lossy, but better than nothing).
tomrod 6 hours ago [-]
Proton Drive may work better here?
mrheosuper 6 hours ago [-]
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.
tommica 4 hours ago [-]
One mistake with your google account and poof, everything is gone.
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.
mrheosuper 4 hours ago [-]
Luckily i have 321 back up, don't i ?
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).
physicles 3 hours ago [-]
I use backblaze with restic. Got about 300GB up there, fully encrypted, keys in 1Password.
CountGeek 4 hours ago [-]
I just purchased a hetzner storage box and used claude to configure kopia to backup to it.
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.
ehe78qhe 7 hours ago [-]
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.
jedberg 7 hours ago [-]
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.
ehe78qhe 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah I do something similar, a local backup on an external drive that mostly lives in a different place and a last resort backup in glacier
unsungNovelty 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah. Which is why I use Ente.com. But I should have a offsite backup of ente.com copy self-hosted as well maybe.
Footprint0521 10 hours ago [-]
What happened?? As someone who is currently doing this without backups…
jedberg 7 hours ago [-]
I moved homes and damaged both drives because they traveled together.
Footprint0521 7 hours ago [-]
I have mine in a RAID 5 setup rn because I was scared about that, but I definitely should set up offsite backups, it’s just so expensive
egberts1 17 minutes ago [-]
I use RAID1 so that each disk can be pulled and used as standalone.
pava0 4 hours ago [-]
Raid is not a backup :( For the really important data (photos, documents, ecc) a small 1GB raspberry pi + USB external HDD works great as a Borg server for daily backup, there is no need for a full NAS when you can store all important data in less the a handful of terabytes
j45 4 hours ago [-]
A raid is one layer and one copy in a backup.
Inherently to inner copy it provides some redundancy.
Backups need more than one copy.
ehe78qhe 4 hours ago [-]
RAID is not a backup because anything happening within that file system happens to both drives immediately.
tmountain 3 hours ago [-]
ZFS snapshots can help, but this is one layer of a comprehensive backup strategy.
SmashDan 10 hours ago [-]
HDD failure probably
tlavoie 10 hours ago [-]
Or a house fire, or flood...
hyperbolablabla 3 hours ago [-]
I have a seedbox for Linux ISOs and then sync to my home NAS with Syncthing. That way I can use private trackers and get a healthy ratio.
iso1631 29 minutes ago [-]
If your server is 100W that's 72kWh a month. If your electricity average is more than 7 cents an hour then it's cheaper to run a $5 server.
small_model 9 hours ago [-]
So not a $5 VPS
ehe78qhe 7 hours ago [-]
read the OP, they mentioned home servers too
patrickdavey 11 hours ago [-]
How are you sharing tailscale with your family and friends? do you run the server yourself?
xgulfie 8 hours ago [-]
Tailscale is free for home use and lets you invite people to your network by email
j4kp07 9 hours ago [-]
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IG_Semmelweiss 6 hours ago [-]
intriguing list
7bit 2 days ago [-]
How many Linux ISOs are stored on your $5 VPS? One?
ehe78qhe 2 days ago [-]
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.
tripleee 14 hours ago [-]
How are you adding new Linux ISOs? Do you prune the ISOs you've already installed somewhere, or are they kept around to be re-installed?
ehe78qhe 11 hours ago [-]
> How are you adding new Linux ISOs?
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.
SmashDan 10 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised you save much space since ISOs are usually stored in already compressed formats
ehe78qhe 7 hours ago [-]
Weirdly, my "Linux ISOs" are compressed in x265 :)
bethekidyouwant 9 hours ago [-]
No he means a full length Linux ISO can be as small as 700 MB, I personally prefer 1.4 GB
10 hours ago [-]
mrheosuper 7 hours ago [-]
Does this mean you have to decompress your "ISOs" when you want to watch them ? Does jellyfin support this ?
ehe78qhe 7 hours ago [-]
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
Oh i thought you went 1 step further, compress all those "ISO" into 1 single blob.
paulcole 1 days ago [-]
I mean just say you’re pirating…
ehe78qhe 1 days ago [-]
Whaaaaaat? That's illegal! I'm just an OS enthusiast!
Leptonmaniac 13 hours ago [-]
We all enjoy a bit of sailing on the OS (Open Sea)
satvikpendem 8 hours ago [-]
Especially using Sailfish OS
doobiedowner 13 hours ago [-]
Boomers like to prove they can still have fun
leptons 9 hours ago [-]
As a gen-x'er, it's my birthright
tomrod 6 hours ago [-]
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?
chr15m 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Roelven 1 hours ago [-]
> "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
ijustlovemath 5 hours ago [-]
Anyone have ACLs or tips on them for securing their tailscale? I'm concerned at the ability for lateral without wanting to sacrifice convenience.
bananadonkey 4 hours ago [-]
ACLs are super simple and work well, just dig into them. I use groups as rbac (one group per role), and share parts of my network with friends/family (game servers), and colleagues (work collab stuff, such as live coding).
Toggling users on/off also works great, and disabled users don't count towards the limit.
physicles 3 hours ago [-]
What stack do you use for that home inference? I’m rolling my own with gemma4, but even with Claude helping with the implementation it’s a lot of moving pieces to figure out.
chr15m 2 hours ago [-]
Ollama running Meta's Glimmer model at the moment. I find it really capable for what I'm doing and it doesn't suffer censorship problems.
myzek 1 hours ago [-]
Are you using the API or is it self hosted as well?
(sorry if this question doesn't make sense)
huijzer 21 minutes ago [-]
Been running services myself for a few years now. This is what I'm lately running. Maintenance is just running apt-get update and upgrade myself every 2 weeks. Apart from that, I don't spend much time on it. The config is basically a Git repo with one folder per Docker Compose service. And then one Caddy which reverse proxies to the other services. I just give each service a unique port. Not Docker network namespaces nonsense. Everything is just a separately running Docker service and they connect via the ports.
- 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)
prolly97 2 hours ago [-]
Hehe, I started out with good and frugal intentions but my $5/month Hetzner VPS has turned into a $100/month bill.
I love exploring all kinds of data, but obviously, if you just do that on an ad hoc basis, the data gets stale. So I just setup some continuous workers and nighly batch jobs that ingest and keep certain data up to date :)
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 :)
throwaway81523 10 hours ago [-]
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.
Velocifyer 10 hours ago [-]
Where do you get it ($4/Year VPS, presumably with IPv4 as it is used for a website) from?
throwaway81523 9 hours ago [-]
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.
Velocifyer 9 hours ago [-]
Does that support HTTP/3 with TLS over QUIC (instead of TCP)
throwaway81523 9 hours ago [-]
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.
2 hours ago [-]
9 hours ago [-]
coolThingsFirst 9 hours ago [-]
Nuts i thought Hetzner had the cheapest options.
oefrha 8 hours ago [-]
Go to LowEndTalk and Hezner will feel like the priciest option. You’ll need a good tolerance for shadiness though.
Loocid 8 hours ago [-]
Having never been on LowEndTalk, what do you mean by shadiness?
oefrha 8 hours ago [-]
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.
throwaway81523 7 hours ago [-]
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.
xandrius 1 hours ago [-]
Upcloud has the cheapest I found, you can get a full VPS for less than $4.
stavros 2 hours ago [-]
They have the cheapest trustworthy options.
TiredOfLife 3 hours ago [-]
Due to RAMpocalypse prices have greatly increased
icar 8 minutes ago [-]
Whatever I need it to do for my current project. Right now, a crawler for a relatively niche search engine.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai 5 hours ago [-]
I use Yggdrasil [0] to connect my computers. This ensures they are always connected within a flat, private IPv6 namespace. However, two computers cannot find each other if they are both behind NAT on different networks. At least one of them must be reachable by the other via TCP. That’s why I use the cheapest VPS I could find as a globally accessible Yggdrasil hub. I’ve been running it this way for many years now, and it works flawlessly. I can even assign names for the IPv6 addresses using regular DNS, which makes things very convenient.
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.
Can you tell how you configured the tool to accomplish this? It sounds very convenient!
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?
massysett 53 minutes ago [-]
“ Anything that saved enough time or replaced enough subscriptions to justify keeping it around?”
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.
viceconsole 8 hours ago [-]
Beelink mini PC, I think S12 with N100 and 16 GB RAM, purchased before the rampocalypse...
I also run Cockpit and Beszel but don't use them often.
Router runs Adguard, Wireguard, and OpenVPN.
forsalebypwner 7 hours ago [-]
What's your strategy for juggling all of these on only 16GB? Docker?
koyote 6 hours ago [-]
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.
viceconsole 2 hours ago [-]
Probably half run natively, and half on podman as systemd quadlets.
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.
ehe78qhe 7 hours ago [-]
That all probably fits comfortably in like 12-14GB easily
mrheosuper 7 hours ago [-]
Why do you need both wireguard and ovpn ?
viceconsole 2 hours ago [-]
Wireguard is easier to set up and add clients so I did that first, but it does not work over my phone's mobile data connection due to carrier filtering, whereas OpenVPN does. Also doesn't hurt to have two options.
egberts1 54 minutes ago [-]
Different platforms
Tinker, tailor, ...?
fragmede 7 hours ago [-]
Might as well add Tailscale if there's already those two. And IPSec.
guidedlight 49 minutes ago [-]
There’s a lot. You can surprisingly run a competent web application with a React client, Go backend, and SQLite DB. Go in particular is very efficient on small compute instances.
It’s definitely a way to get a competitive advantage over others that rely on more traditional architecture.
bawolff 14 hours ago [-]
My personal homepage.
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.
MikeNotThePope 2 hours ago [-]
After having traveled the world, hearing "only $5" reminds me of how how far that goes in some places. Right now I have a friend in Nepal renting a 2 bedroom house for $58/month. I have another friend in Nepal that's earns less than $100/month, and is able to afford they're own place to live alone.
xandrius 1 hours ago [-]
So, you'd get 1/11 of a renting a house in Nepal, so?
keithnz 11 hours ago [-]
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)
ak6te 9 hours ago [-]
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?
keithnz 9 hours ago [-]
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.
Marsymars 4 hours ago [-]
What does Cloudflare add over just plain GitHub Pages?
(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.)
bawolff 9 hours ago [-]
Sure there are plenty of options out there, but its kind of nice to just have my own thing.
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.
kaydub 10 hours ago [-]
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.
zem 8 hours ago [-]
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.
WD-42 10 hours ago [-]
You just listed off 3 different services, probably involves even more than that.
Bro has a single server and ssh.
keithnz 9 hours ago [-]
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
spc476 7 hours ago [-]
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.
conductr 7 hours ago [-]
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
bawolff 8 hours ago [-]
meh, but then you have to keep track of the changing landscape for not much benefit.
Meanwhile, i have been apt-get install'ing apache since i was a teenager, and it still all works the same.
loloquwowndueo 9 hours ago [-]
lol GitHub is down all the time.
nrdvana 8 hours ago [-]
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.
forsalebypwner 7 hours ago [-]
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
Fabricio20 5 hours ago [-]
I vouch for gitea too! I have it on my home cluster with about 50 repos and some actions, 150MB memory for gitea and 50MB memory for the actions/runner pod sitting idle. Plus postgres (another < 200mb). Do keep in mind gitea does ALOT of read queries on page load so keep db and gitea close, but it's tiny!!
karp773 6 hours ago [-]
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.
wraptile 1 hours ago [-]
These VPS no longer make much sense for self-hosting imo. I have two refurbished 32gb ram Lenovo k14 laptops (250$ each) that I use for self-hosting over tailscale and cloudflare tunnels. This is a lot of compute and very little power use.
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.
xandrius 1 hours ago [-]
I do self-host but the amount of maintenance that physical machines require is a cost in itself.
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.
wraptile 46 minutes ago [-]
I think you are underestimating modern hardware though I'd agree that it's more of a hobby than fire-and-forget of an VPS app.
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.
meteyor 1 hours ago [-]
I think if I had a VPS I would install a Pangolin tunnel on it so I don't have to expose my home IP to the interwebs. I wouldn't run anything else on the VPS itself.
SyzygyRhythm 6 hours ago [-]
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.
nicbou 2 hours ago [-]
An appointment finder for the Berlin citizen's office. It looks for available appointments and broadcasts them to people via websockets. A frontend shows a calendar of available appointments and makes a sound when new slots are available.
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.
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.
iaaan 6 hours ago [-]
Where is it hosted that costs a few cents per month?
Kwpolska 3 hours ago [-]
That's probably because `pass` is a dumb idea if you have a phone or a Windows PC and want to access your passwords there.
equinumerous 6 hours ago [-]
I would be terrified of the server being breached and having my passwords/key material leaked.
oarfish 6 hours ago [-]
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.
what 6 hours ago [-]
Uh, where are you getting a “cloud VM” for a few cents per month?
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.
neilmovva 2 hours ago [-]
I work on a product called Sailboxes [0], which are durable cloud VMs designed to be effectively free when idle. It's elastically powerful enough to host a Minecraft server (my preferred use case), but still scales down to near-zero resource consumption when nothing heavy is running. More recently, it's become the default cloud environment for all my coding agents, because I can control and fork its state whenever I want.
I have a couple of $10/yearly (so less than $1 a month) VPSs. (Found them on Lowendbox.com).
Some uses:
- 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.
elias_t 2 hours ago [-]
Wow that’s really cheap. Are the VPS reliable?
lode 1 hours ago [-]
suprisingly so... Haven't had any unplanned downtime in a couple of years. (But as I mentioned, I treat them as disposable and wouldn't miss anything if they disappeared suddenly.)
voidUpdate 3 hours ago [-]
On my local network:
- 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)
petercooper 53 minutes ago [-]
A bit frivolous, but I once used a spare VPS like that as a one-listener Internet radio station for my mom which worked with her portable radio (she has no interest in using Spotify etc.)
Saigonautica 7 hours ago [-]
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:
I have kept a personal server for decades in one form or another. At the moment running two Optiplex 9020s (Intel I7, 8GB RAM) one running TrueNAS (and several USB hard drives) and the other is the "app" server running Debian LTS. I prefer local servers because I can usually get far more bang for my buck at the cost of the headache of putting it on the Internet. The power cost to run both is the same as a cheap VPS. Recycling old consumer/SOHO tech is probably the best bang for your buck.
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.
maurits 2 hours ago [-]
I self-host my blog on a VPS, because I like having my own little corner on the internet.
Way way back when, I also did it to learn a bit more about daily *nix craft.
dada216 3 hours ago [-]
Hosted in a cloud: a VPN
Lowendtalk Is an amazing community to get offers for those.
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.
archerx 10 minutes ago [-]
- my procedurally generated fashion e-shop that has infinite designs for various apparel
- 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.
jamiepond 1 hours ago [-]
`ssh ssh.cowsinlove.com` is an extension of https://cowsinlove.com. game coming soon. -- edit, formatting
droidjj 9 hours ago [-]
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.
A keep alive for my IRC, a discord bot, a very basic work website and a couple TTRPG tools that I made (with LLM) and shared to the other players.
bthallplz 16 hours ago [-]
I started out "self-hosting" by paying for self-hosted app instances on PikaPods, but then I learned could get a $5 VPS and run most of the same apps there for less cost overall per month while knowing very little about how it all works (using CapRover on a DigitalOcean VPS).
The main apps I run are Actual Budget (YNAB alternative), Wallabag (read-it-later service), and FreshRSS (RSS aggregator).
I've also been using the VPS to run some scripts daily for my planet site(s): they ingest RSS feeds, regenerate the static site files, and push the files to my static site host (https://pgs.sh) instead of worrying about hosting them myself (threatening the VPS's apps).
Agingcoder 2 hours ago [-]
Apps I write for myself using coding agents that match exactly what I need and that simply don’t exist in the market.
olivierduval 2 hours ago [-]
Actually, I got both:
- Cheap VPS is nice for electric & network reliability (mail servers, public facing website or webapp)
- local hosting is nice for price/control/internal tools (some git and maven, different tools)
cpro29a 5 hours ago [-]
Two spot VPS on GCP hosting bespoke besedka chat with bob ai agent (test and prod). Both backup their data to R2 so spot disruption is minimal.
And I don't pay for it, as Google AI Pro (former Google One) subscription gives me 10$ monthly GCP credits that cover two spot instances bill.
kitsune_cw 2 hours ago [-]
I host a private instance of OpenWebUI connected to OpenRouter, so I can talk to new models ~immediately after they become available. I also have Qwen3.8 27b (abliterated) running in a spare PC for any queries I know will get censored by cloud LLMs.
beaker52 2 hours ago [-]
OpenRouter has its own chat UI so the benefit is unclear to me.
m00dy 1 hours ago [-]
Benefit is none
0x262d 13 hours ago [-]
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.
asim 3 hours ago [-]
It's not $5. More like $25 but I run a bunch of personal apps like reminder.dev - quran, aslam.org - islamic knowledge and micro.mu - personal assistant.
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.
assimpleaspossi 10 hours ago [-]
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.
CWuestefeld 8 hours ago [-]
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.
t1ll 3 hours ago [-]
I use my VPS mainly for development tasks. Moving from working locally to having the work done on a permanently running machine on the web was a real unlock for me. Setup is simple with Tailscale, so I can sleep better, and Podium ADE, which is my development tool of choice
skybrian 12 hours ago [-]
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.
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).
simgoh 10 hours ago [-]
This is something I've been looking to do for myself lately to try and have more control over my "feed(s)" and consume the actual content I like.
Any stories to share about setup or specific apps? I've heard freshRSS named as the way to go.
A Tailscale exit router with a small SFTP folder, and Seafile for public file access. Basically my own DIY file sharing for clients to avoid putting private stuff on WeTransfer.
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.
agnishom 8 hours ago [-]
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
n8henrie 8 hours ago [-]
Can you elaborate?
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?
ehe78qhe 7 hours ago [-]
- They're not using a VPS, they're using a server hosted inside their house
- 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 5 hours ago [-]
> You have to buy a DNS name for your public IP
What are you talking about?
ehe78qhe 5 hours ago [-]
If you want TLS for your websites/webapps you're gonna need a DNS name to get a cert
cubesnooper 3 hours ago [-]
No, Let’s Encrypt provides IP address certificates for free.
agnishom 6 hours ago [-]
I use the VPS mainly to route traffic from my in-house server.
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.
alprado50 3 hours ago [-]
I have two VPS that i use to host almost 20 wordpress websites. I use FrankenPHP and the SQLite plugin to deploy them and i find it enjoyable. To create a new website I just copy a folder and change a few files. Pretty cool. Makes me wonder why would anybode decide to create a static site.
omgbear 1 hours ago [-]
I have a gitolite server on a scaleway VPS, but it's only about $1 a month.
dfish 7 hours ago [-]
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.
lelanthran 5 hours ago [-]
Gitea, some static homepage and, at one point, a B2B SaaS that served around 5k users, with PostgreSQL running, all at the same time.
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...
z2 6 hours ago [-]
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.
xtracto 6 hours ago [-]
Lots of stuff:
- 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.
lhoff 2 hours ago [-]
> 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:
You might want to have a look at pocketbase. I use it as a backend for my vibecoded "auto-SaaS" Tools.
chowchowchow 10 hours ago [-]
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.
vladgur 8 hours ago [-]
$10/mo buys 7 vCPU Cores and 8gb ram which is not bad at all.
Mail server
Amnezia VPN
keibidrop daemon to access files on-demand
a bunch of 1 off micro tools (metadata remover via static html, gains tracker, etc.)
edarchis 4 hours ago [-]
Uptime Kuma, a monitoring system. A lot of commercial monitoring systems are expensive as hell. I like Updown.io, where you can pay per use but Uptime Kuma offers more features, albeit being single user.
[edit] I listen to a bunch of audiobooks, so Audiobookshelf.org
grugdev42 2 days ago [-]
* 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)
mindwork 19 hours ago [-]
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.
mtlynch 11 hours ago [-]
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?
spl757 2 days ago [-]
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.
Sha1rholder 2 days ago [-]
Deploy email server on a vps is super risky and troublesome
spl757 1 days ago [-]
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.
Lammy 12 hours ago [-]
Luck of the draw due to IP address reputation. I host my email on a $5 VPS, but the IP has mapped to my VPS for like 15 years so it's fine.
hackernud3s 10 hours ago [-]
You never really know though, do you? Some things are ending up in spam and you don't know which ones.
It can vary, I did it for a few years with no issues or deliverability problems
7bit 2 days ago [-]
Lol no and no
qup 23 hours ago [-]
I've been doing this for over a decade, and I've never had one turn to spam yet.
I do think about it sometimes when databases leak, though.
rerdavies 13 hours ago [-]
I had an abandoned ISP email account dating to the 90's that I used before I sold my soul to Google. Out of curiosity, I resurrected it, last year, and sure enough, it has been chunking away receiving about 400 spam email messages a day.
To be honest, I did use it as a sacrificial email account for a while, used to sign up for websites that weren't completely trustworthy back in the day.
returningfory2 9 hours ago [-]
I have 3 VPSs so that I can run redundant copies of the data scraping software I wrote [0]. I've been scraping NYC subway data for 5+ years.
The biggest VPS hosts my NYC subway times app, my personal website, and other tools I build (most recently my pottery project management tool [1]).
Then in addition I've a bunch of monitoring software. I also run a rollouts system that automatically rolls out new versions of my projects when the GitHub CI builds them.
It's a really interesting thing to do! The maintenance is kind of the point: you get to learn essentially how to build a prod deployment.
I have a 8€ storage VPS from Alpha VPS. It's far from a beefy machine. Hosting it for a few years so far. It has a blog generated with Hugo, WireGuard Easy VPN for me and my friends, Forgejo for a few small repos, SFTPGo for files. Even VPN hosting itself saves me and my friend maybe around 50$ a month. Maintenance is easy, and even easier after AI. Definitely worth it.
SmashDan 10 hours ago [-]
$50 a month for vpn?!
monk_grilla 10 hours ago [-]
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.
robwayne 9 hours ago [-]
Uptime is my justification.
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.
Marsymars 4 hours ago [-]
For me it's not exactly "uptime" I care about, but the fact that if there's a power cut on the first day of a 2-week trip, my home server is then offline for the duration. I don't mind sporadic downtime if I'm home and can fix it at my convenience, but it's pretty inconvenient if I'm not home and can't fix something I rely on.
(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.)
PhilipRoman 17 minutes ago [-]
I'm curious why do you need manual intervention after a power cut. Isn't configuring bios enough for this?
throwawayk7h 10 hours ago [-]
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.
monk_grilla 5 hours ago [-]
I use Cloudflare tunnels for anything I want to expose to the internet, that gives me enough peace of mind, though I understand a VPS would be the least-risk and highest-uptime option, my risk profile and uptime requirements don't make it necessary.
Numerlor 10 hours ago [-]
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?
LTL_FTC 9 hours ago [-]
Cloudflare tunnels work pretty well for this, tho. That with vlan or diff lan and it’s mostly fine.
ro_bit 8 hours ago [-]
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.
forsalebypwner 7 hours ago [-]
>I use a $5 VPS + $3 for 0.5gb of block storage to host shitty video game clips I want to share with my friend
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.
AnotherGoodName 8 hours ago [-]
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).
IG_Semmelweiss 5 hours ago [-]
so you've basically spun up your own personal VPN.
Makes sense for all the reasons you stated. Curious - would this have been doable for a non technical person pre LLM ?
fragmede 5 hours ago [-]
Yes - Tailscale packages it up nicely and they even have an apple TV app.
kaydub 10 hours ago [-]
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.
mattfrommars 2 days ago [-]
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.
ramon156 2 hours ago [-]
on a VPS i host anything that preferably should stay online but isnt heavy. think DNS, headscale, forgejo, etc.
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
mycofunguy 10 hours ago [-]
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.
(OpenBSD)
accrual 9 hours ago [-]
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.?
mycofunguy 8 hours ago [-]
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!
vsgherzi 6 hours ago [-]
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!
efilife 6 hours ago [-]
same, would love to see it!
eternaut 37 minutes ago [-]
calibre library with over 1300 books
miyuru 3 hours ago [-]
I am from a Asian country, so some downloads from other side of the world are sometimes slow and not stable.
So I have a VPS running for thoses downloads and any that slow.
asimovDev 3 hours ago [-]
Do you curl the file onto the VPS and then scp or do you open a tunnel ?
toxic 6 hours ago [-]
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.
sreekanth67 6 hours ago [-]
what do you do with all these domains ?
toxic 6 hours ago [-]
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.
CTOSian 1 hours ago [-]
miniflux RSS , on the "free" google compute engine, it's great for this.
ExtremisAndy 8 hours ago [-]
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!
dvdyzag 5 hours ago [-]
Running a long time DO droplet with an ancient Ubuntu LTS, almost 10 years now. Back when it was $5. Just a static html with Apache2. Planning to downsize to a $4 droplet and wireguard it to a homeserver for more web projects.
walrus01 8 minutes ago [-]
tertiary authoritative nameserver on another continent
sebnun 2 days ago [-]
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.
Static and dynamic websites, VPN, email server, blog, testing of web applications.
davekubehub 10 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
gullevek 5 hours ago [-]
- IRC
- RSS
- GIT
- other private web page for certain things (weather, some date/time stats for birthdays, etc)
- private link/content share
mrheosuper 7 hours ago [-]
My own VPN. I live in country where internet speed to some "foreign" website is heavily limited because the goverment does not like those websites.
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.
ehe78qhe 7 hours ago [-]
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
JDSP 2 hours ago [-]
MediaMTX so I can stream to it in whatever quality I want
jxdxbx 7 hours ago [-]
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.
daitangio 4 hours ago [-]
Mail server + static site + isso comment server
Owning your email is nice, and save you sone bucks if you want family accounts.
skipkey 7 hours ago [-]
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.
jdboyd 2 days ago [-]
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.
justsomehuman 10 hours ago [-]
Not quite as cheap as $5 but I've been running at Hetzner CAX31 for a couple of years now and I run the following services / apps.
I used to run a couple of Hugo blogs but I've ended up moving them to bunny.
kaydub 10 hours ago [-]
This is a good list of things
fak3r 15 hours ago [-]
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.
opengrass 8 hours ago [-]
Docker services with TSDProxy. No Tailscale container needed per service, one proxy handles everything.
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.
anakaiti 8 hours ago [-]
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.
mrinterweb 11 hours ago [-]
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.
gooseyman 9 hours ago [-]
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
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.
zhivota 11 hours ago [-]
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.
pkulak 7 hours ago [-]
Set up a family chat, with a built-in helper agent?
I run a bunch of static sites and small Ruby on Rails sites on a single $10 vps. I also serve my birdnet front end from it.
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.
anticorporate 9 hours ago [-]
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.
arcanemachiner 9 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure you could accomplish this with a free DDNS, like DuckDNS.
ceritium 13 hours ago [-]
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.
axus 11 hours ago [-]
Testing a game, using for VPN, learning how to keep a public IPv6 address secure. So, it's an investment in education.
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.
ThatPlayer 9 hours ago [-]
Pangolin VPS for forwarding and auth to stuff on my mini PCs. And then just a bunch of random vibe coded web UIs so I can access on my phone and such.
Host bitwarden and gitea which are useful too.
ultrahax 9 hours ago [-]
A gnu screen session hosting an irc client so I can stay connected.
ivraatiems 10 hours ago [-]
I run my personal site and a bunch of various small sites and projects off a VPS that costs around $25/year.
I also have another one of a similar price coloated in Luxembourg, for reasons which are legal in Luxembourg.
Traubenfuchs 3 hours ago [-]
In Oracle Cloud’s PAYGO always free tier you get 4x6GB vps you can run managed kubernetes on. + free mysql db and many other things…
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.
jeanpah 6 hours ago [-]
I ran several customers webpages, blogs, Even bussines aplications, still do, Sqlite is awesome.
runjake 2 days ago [-]
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.
neverminder 2 days ago [-]
Seedbox. With 5TB storage attached. Glory to Hetzner.
01arjuna 2 days ago [-]
Don't ever give it up, it won't be $5 anymore.
denkmoon 11 hours ago [-]
PowerDNS so I have direct control over my public namespace.
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.
Venn1 10 hours ago [-]
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.
meken 9 hours ago [-]
A discord bot would be my excuse for a VPS because it uses websockets (can’t run serverless). I don’t have such a bot right now though :)
leduyquang753 5 hours ago [-]
Well you could host it in a containerized app service like AWS's Fargate and it would still be considered serverless.
10 hours ago [-]
masfuerte 11 hours ago [-]
I have a $15/annum VPS. It only has 128MB RAM. They don't offer them this small or this cheap any more.
I run a private Matrix server using conduit. It has about ten active users.
wkoszek 11 hours ago [-]
LowEndBox often lists similar VPSes if anyone here is interested
kaydub 10 hours ago [-]
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
jotato 2 days ago [-]
Mine aren't technically VPSs but I have two mini pc.
- 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
alg0rith 2 hours ago [-]
A discord bot
lanstin 11 hours ago [-]
Not sure it's actually useful, but I run my own DNS and email (and imapd) and gotosocial instances. Small HTTP server for family recipes.
efortis 10 hours ago [-]
I have little personal notes, and gym tracker apps.
Their backend is just a json file, which I GET and PUT with Nginx + WebDav + Basic Auth
johnisgood 9 hours ago [-]
Personal website with a public git repository. Maintenance costs in time, not much though.
VariousPrograms 11 hours ago [-]
I have a website, git, and syncthing relay hosted on a bargain basement VPS. Lowendbox lists some providers for like $1-2/mo.
MisterMunchkin 11 hours ago [-]
Plex saves a fortune in subscriptions, and you actually get to watch things in 4k.
(Netflix caps you at 720p to prevent you pirating it)
kidnoodle 2 hours ago [-]
An alternative interface I built for my kids’ Yoto players which adds an intercom feature so I can broadcast messages like “Come have breakfast!” without yelling upstairs.
cubesnooper 2 hours ago [-]
Most important? SSH, WireGuard, HTTP proxy. (Services I need accessible to me without a VPN.) Email, authoritative DNS, web server. (Services I need accessible to anyone on the Net.) Mumble, various game servers. (Services I need accessible to my friends.)
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).
ogou 2 days ago [-]
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.
chapz 13 hours ago [-]
Transmission, Tailscale, Glance Homepage and NginxProxy which points to my local PC and the rest of the services running there.
dare944 2 days ago [-]
Mail / IMAP server for my family domain. Small web server with a few static content sites. Trillium notes server.
Pretty low maintenance overall - I can go months without even thinking about it.
hmyn 4 hours ago [-]
it starts with something then it is just hard not to have any more
onel 2 days ago [-]
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.
DeluluDon 12 hours ago [-]
A Reticulum Network Stack transport node that's geographically strategic. I liked the idea behind it.
Sha1rholder 2 days ago [-]
Deploy a vpn
spcebar 1 days ago [-]
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.
ehwa37 6 hours ago [-]
CS 1.6 server
scottydelta 2 days ago [-]
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.
keithnz 11 hours ago [-]
I run a discord bot for my dota2 guild, works well, deployed as a container
mceleri 12 hours ago [-]
Dev guy here, so tailscale + Antigravity (+ GitHub).
I use it to vibecode from my smartphone
slipwalker 2 days ago [-]
openresty with several half-done micro-saas, written in golang with sqlite3 storage.
i use the oracle x86 1gb ram to host php and static websites.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2 days ago [-]
1. Authoritative DNS server
2. Rendezvous server ("supernode")
TZubiri 11 hours ago [-]
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.
solnyshok 11 hours ago [-]
tailscale, onedrive, smb, transmission, torrserver, stremio server
runnr_az 13 hours ago [-]
finger.farm finger server...
sigbottle 11 hours ago [-]
Self hosting nebula
nekusar 8 hours ago [-]
Nginx.
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.
browningstreet 2 days ago [-]
Hermes and an Orca dev server
fragmede 1 days ago [-]
Factorio server
AndrewKemendo 9 hours ago [-]
I usually have a half dozen experiments I want GA on any browser so I’ll just host applications on different ports or subdomains
I use mine as basically an open test server I can play with
mikewarot 2 days ago [-]
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.
The price was low enough that I left it running.
dyauspitr 11 hours ago [-]
VPN and a virtual machine that downloads torrents. Host your blog on it if you don’t get a lot of visitors.
bigstrat2003 14 hours ago [-]
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).
phs318u 2 days ago [-]
NetBird on the VPS.
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.
robotnikman 11 hours ago [-]
reverse proxy
calvinmorrison 11 hours ago [-]
website yes but what about irc bouncer?
justsomehnguy 13 hours ago [-]
thatsbait.jpg
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.
gspr 7 hours ago [-]
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.
xeornet 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah someones political opinions are relevant to whether someone should use a VPS or not...
gspr 9 minutes ago [-]
That's not what I wrote. I wrote that someone's terrible terrible views on human beings is relevant to whether you should take any advice from them whatsoever.
There's plenty of non-terrible humans that can advice you on VPSs.
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ReDress 4 hours ago [-]
Oh, well.
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 :-)
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/
- 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)
- 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)
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
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.
[0]: https://docs.sailresearch.com/sailboxes
- 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.
- 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://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.
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.
https://almeidapaulopt.github.io/tsdproxy/
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 :-)