I'm a Linux guy and have on many points of my life have a personal server. So I like the idea of having something always on, but I’m not sure the maintenance is worth it when most things can just run on my laptop.
That said, I tend to do things myself and only later realize I could have automated or delegated them, so I may have a blind spot here.
If you have a cheap VPS or mini PC, what actually ended up being useful long-term? Anything that saved enough time or replaced enough subscriptions to justify keeping it around?
And it also runs a Home Assistant instance inside a docker container, and serves as an MQTT broker for my ESP devices.
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.
- qBittorrent for "Linux ISOs"
- Jellyfin so I can watch/read/listen to my "Linux ISOs"
- Tailscale so me, my family and friends can watch/read/listen to my "Linux ISOs" from anywhere in the world
- Self hosting my photo albums. Immich is a handy choice for this. Very useful for personal photos you don't want to trust to strange tech companies.
- Gitea for self-hosting git repos for some personal projects I have not open-sourced.
If you're privacy conscious, please be aware that Tailscale by default is creating behavioral metadata from all of those computers for the Room 641As of the world about everything you do on your supposedly “private” network: https://tailscale.com/docs/features/logging
“This includes real-time events for open and close events for every inter-machine connection (TCP or UDP) on your network.”
If you don't think 2 hours of professionally produced content is worth $10, well that's why AI isn't the only thing destroying art and culture.
Ask yourself what other types of media can be had on popular torrent sites.
I used to do this, until I learned the value of offsite backups.
Learn from my mistake (if you aren't already :) ).
My photos are on: Captured devices(phones, camera). Immich on my homelab, and google photo(which is lossy, but better than nothing).
It is generous of you to share your "Linux ISOs" with your family and friends.
With qBittorrent.
> Do you prune the ISOs you've already installed somewhere, or are they kept around to be re-installed?
I keep them all. Compression algorithms are pretty good these days, as is storage density.
But yes, Jellyfin can also natively transcode formats on the fly if you stick a GPU in there: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/transcoding/
It also hosts e-books, primarily so I can load up the website in an ebook reader and download my own books, rather than worry about connecting my reader up via cable and so on.
Also when I'm out, and I find a maybe interesting book, I can check if I have it or (if the price is too high) add it to my wishlist. Similar for relatives who wish to buy me a book. I live in Asia but primarily read in English, so I do have to capitalize on opportunities to buy books when they arise.
It's open-source, I've been running it a few years, you can use it if you like. It runs on a potato, so your 5$ VPS will be able to host several other things at the same time:
https://github.com/seanboyce/ubiblio
tierhive.com has super cheap VPS, as low as 10 cents/month for a tiny one (128MB ram, 1GB SSD). ipv6 only, with a NAT proxy for ipv4 I think. It's quite possible to run a useful basic Debian server on that. I ran one with 32MB ram for a while.
I dont know how much value there is to that, but i like having an apache server just running on the internet with a page on it. After all it is only $5
Its also useful in a pinch if i have to transfer files somewhere. upload with scp then download with http is easy, and i dont have to worry about third party services or anything.
As far as scaling, it's apache serving static html. Even on a $5 vps it would be incredibly difficult to saturate that.
Also sometimes i just want a host to try things on and experiment with.
I don't miss sshing into servers or using puppet, ansible, salt, chef.
Bro has a single server and ssh.
Meanwhile, i have been apt-get install'ing apache since i was a teenager, and it still all works the same.
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.
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.
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
After getting into home assistant and setting up a proper home server I no longer saw a need to keep the VPS running. With cloudflare reverse proxy I can still host personal websites, but from inside my home network. Since getting the home server I'm discovering a lot of neat self hosted options and use it a lot more than I ever did the VPS. If nothing else, hosting your own stuff provides a great place to learn and explore. It doesn't have to be always on/on the internet for that to be true though.
I 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).
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
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.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightscout
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!
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).
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/
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/
https://github.com/pkulak/barnaby-home
That, plus tailscale and Secure Shellfish on my iPhone and I can vibe code from anywhere.
I've been really happy after upgrading my home server from a Pi to a Beelink Mini a couple of years ago. Pays itself off pretty quickly once you factor in your subscription savings and you own the hardware, have very fast local streaming on your LAN and avoid having to trust yet another third party.
I do put most things on my home box (certainly can't put my media server data on $5 VPS!), but stuff like my XMPP server, websites, etc. that I want available even when my power or Internet goes out live on a VPS.
I run a bunch of cheap (free?) custom apps for myself in the "serverless" or "cloud native" stuff in AWS. Everything else is on my NAS running on my home network (I see people mentioning qbittorrent, jellyfin, etc).
I stopped using cheap vps providers probably a decade ago, not a huge difference between a $5/mo cheap vps to a basic ec2 instance in pricing. And there were always issues with the cheap vps. Not to mention how easy it is to backup mediawiki + mysql in AWS vs having to spin up ANOTHER vps. Maybe there are cheap vps providers that offer object storage now, but I never bothered looking.
https://almeidapaulopt.github.io/tsdproxy/
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.
(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!
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.
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.
My primary use case is to be able to use [dumbthingiwanttoshare].mydomain.tld without having to touch DNS records. The VPS has a static IP; I often don't.
Host bitwarden and gitea which are useful too.
I installed Plex but ended up not using it, so I removed it.
* https://www.langturbo.com
I hope to do more, AI coding allowed me to do a lot of stuff I had been putting off for lack of energy.
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.
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/
I also have another one of a similar price coloated in Luxembourg, for reasons which are legal in Luxembourg.
I self-host plenty at home, but most are things that are mainly needed at home like Jellyfin, however that's available to others via the NAT/firewall/Traefik, but other things stay inside the FW since I don't need to access them from the outside.
Having a WebDAV enabled a server that can generate thumbnails for photos, allow browsing through them, serve as an audio and video player, and also acts as a markdown and note-taking server has been immensely valuable. I write several apps that can write themselves back to the server over WebDAV sort of like tiddlywiki, so the overall combination has been extremely useful.
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.
All of those are in different containers running through podman.
Recently I moved everything to nixos with the help of Claude, It did everything.
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.
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.
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)
Caveat: almost all of them only listen on a Tailscale network interface, so they are not directly exposed to the Internet.
- 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
Local classifier models that run and train on CPU, GitHub: https://github.com/nicobrenner/jeffy
my workloads are suited to serverless platforms like Cloudflare.
Pretty low maintenance overall - I can go months without even thinking about it.
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.
( my post-factum inspiration: https://stevehanov.ca/blog/how-i-run-multiple-10k-mrr-compan... )
Just spending thinking juice on whether you should spend 5$/mo on a server is already a huge issue, just do it and in general increase your investment in proffessional tooling.
I use mine as basically an open test server I can play with
Handy to have a non commercial VPN solution you can deploy in any region.
2. Rendezvous server ("supernode")
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.