Rendered at 16:24:01 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
billfor 11 minutes ago [-]
I feel old I just open a port for https on my 24x7 raspberry pi and route anything I need through that, for home access, openHAB, etc.... haproxy can look at the beginning of the packet to see if it is ssh and forward that to a server with mutualTLS, and with ssh you can forward anything you want back. If its TLS it goes to nginx which is locked down by vouch-proxy. fail2ban runs in the background to limit abuse - you do need to set up transparent proxying to keep the real IP but it's easy to do. A benefit to this method is you can also do SNI routing and get free wifi in some places :-)
ehe78qhe 2 days ago [-]
On my home server (just an older desktop PC)
- 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.
Lammy 13 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.”
Once you get to N = >10 devices, and expect some degree of decentralized communication between them you find yourself maintaining N^2 entries. Every change to the set of public keys, require you updating N entries. Things get worse once you want consistent rules on what-device-should-access-what.
I initially used WireGuard, but as my home lab scaled, it became unwieldy. Some people could work around these limitations with bash scripts, but if you have an heterogeneous environment (esp iOS clients), making programmatic configuration changes to WireGuard becomes trickier.
Today I use Tailscale (with Headscale as the control plane) for all users, and WireGuard as a emergency access to key servers.
ctkhn 1 hours ago [-]
Does headscale fully replace the corporate tailscale network? I've been looking at replacing my home wireguard if I can self-host tailscale but haven't had the free time to really figure out how much privacy I can retain by using headscale.
zrail 33 minutes ago [-]
It definitely can. By default it ships with the normal Tailscale DERP map but it also ships with a default-off DERP server. You can turn that on and set your DERP map to only include that one server (or you can fan out a couple if you want). At that point you're not using Tailscale assets at all.
vohk 45 minutes ago [-]
For much the same reason most people choose Windows or Mac over Gentoo. Most people set up something like Tailscale to accomplish something rather than create a project and ongoing maintenance burden for themselves, and setting up Wireguard is not terribly friendly to the uninitiated.
daymanstep 2 minutes ago [-]
WireGuard is one of the easiest things to set up. The total amount of reading you'd need to do to set up WireGuard amounts to half of a page. I spent more time figuring out what firewall rules are needed for WireGuard traffic than actually setting up WireGuard, it's so simple.
drinchev 1 hours ago [-]
I started with Wireguard first, however the setup / maintenance makes it a way bigger project than simply using Tailscale.
red-iron-pine 1 hours ago [-]
arguably that's the entire point of tailscale -- ain't gotta worry about the logistics
Scarbutt 1 hours ago [-]
How does wireguard helps you with NAT traversal? Reliable NAT traversal on top of wireguard is their moat.
devilbunny 41 minutes ago [-]
> Reliable NAT traversal on top of wireguard is their moat
And a damned good one at that. I can spend five minutes on a (family) nontechnical user's device and set it up to be able to access the parts of my network it needs to get to, and it's easy enough to use that I can walk them through the troubleshooting over the phone if it ever goes awry. Regardless of where they are or I am.
ehe78qhe 12 hours ago [-]
i literally do not care about that metadata
Lammy 9 hours ago [-]
Sad
ehe78qhe 8 hours ago [-]
Why? It's TCP/UDP connection data for troubleshooting you can turn off. No privacy issue there.
traceroute66 7 hours 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.
sampullman 5 hours ago [-]
I ran Headscale for a while, and now wireguard directly, but never really considered it to be more private.
What is Tailscale getting that my ISP and google/Facebook via their pixels and tracking scripts aren't?
TeMPOraL 5 hours ago [-]
> You may jest "but its only metadata", but you can do a lot with metadata, especially if its all nicely attractively centralised like Tailscale.
Like? What exactly could they plausibly do, that I should care about, if I otherwise have no reason to worry about these institutions?
cyphar 3 hours ago [-]
"We kill people based on metadata." - NSA Chief Gen. Michael Hayden, 2014[1]
In case you were not aware, spooks have focused on metadata analysis over "full take" (data) analysis for a very long time because they are far more effective and require less data to analyse. This has been the case at least since the early 2000s with Stellar Wind but arguably even the Stasi worked this way -- they cared a lot more about who you were talking to than what you were talking about. The Snowden revelations in 2013 talked almost entirely about metadata-only systems that were being used to invasively surveil the world.
If your point was more "I have nothing to hide" then you can find plenty of articles online to disabuse you of that notion. There's even a Wikipedia article about it[2].
Can you be on the internet and avoid the collection of metadata that can eventually be accessible for the NSA or other TLA? You have an ISP which logs everything, same for your destination endpoint, and those logs are already being correlated.
Can I even hide from NSA level adversaries without employing extreme methods? Assuming "no", then for this particular threat model do the tools employed next matter?
cyphar 1 hours ago [-]
There is some evidence that Tor has posed significant problems for three-letter-agencies in the past, so it's not like there is nothing to be done at all.
But there is a bigger point to be made: in my experience most privacy activists argue that taking an absolutist stance personally is counter-productive -- just because it is almost impossible to completely eliminate risks from your life does not mean you should give up and not try to minimise them. And of course, the goal for most people isn't to protect against targeted attacks (since that means you already need to take fugitive-on-the-run-level precautions), it's to avoid becoming a target in the first place.
efficax 12 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
serf 13 hours ago [-]
good alternatives that do near the same thing?
clavicle1009 5 hours ago [-]
Netbird, been using it for about 6 months now with no complaints. Fully OSS, mobile clients, etc.
jjordan 13 hours ago [-]
self-hosted open source alternative Headscale/Headplane. Uses the Tailscale client without their SaaS being involved.
cls59 9 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 8 hours ago [-]
How do you know their client won't send them the metadata anyway?
singpolyma3 3 hours ago [-]
It is open source
ErroneousBosh 9 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 8 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`.
telesilla 5 hours ago [-]
It's a VPN essentially but just works easily and affordably. We don't stress on managing keys, secrets etc and it's SSO friendly.
chr15m 12 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 11 hours ago [-]
Is that the prompt you would use, or is there more to it?
beepbooptheory 11 hours ago [-]
The wireguard docs are pretty good, and it's probably worth it at least a little to actually understand what it does.
I saw all the Netbird recs here so looked into it briefly. Depends I guess on what you use Tailscale for. Tailscale Funnel is easy and stable. Self-hosted on Netbird is ... a bit more involved.
Definitely a place for both services, IMO.
12 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 10 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.
itintheory 3 hours ago [-]
First I've heard of this DHT indexer concept. Is this bitmagnet? What kind of resources does it require? Thanks for any info you can provide.
cousinbryce 5 hours ago [-]
It’s so hard to find drivers for those
germinalphrase 2 hours ago [-]
I used to have a substantial collection of very rare Euro/US short and performance art films on DVD that were lost to the sands of time during a period of my life where my work led me to be mostly nomadic. In retrospect, I wish I would have ripped the collection onto a hard drive as most of them are completely irreplaceable now on DVD.
19 hours ago [-]
account42 5 hours ago [-]
$1 won't get you Linux ISOs up to modern display standards. Great if that works for you but the high end is more like $20+ (emphasis on the +, taxes and shipping not included) per Linux ISO so its understanding why many might prefer sharing them digitally. And that's before getting into cases where the Linux ISO vendors don't even want to give you the specific version you want.
mrngld 4 hours ago [-]
Did you see the 'thrift store' part of his comment? I do the same thing as him, and depending on the location around town, an ISO on a DVD can be as little as 50 cents, and a modern Linux ISO on bluray, including 4K (though rare I see those) are rarely over maybe $3.
dawnerd 55 minutes ago [-]
I started picking them up from the library. Goodwill wants like five bucks a disk now. Library has them for .25 to a dollar each. Or free if you just check them out.
hdb2 2 hours ago [-]
glad to hear I'm not the only one!!!
a few months back I opened up a streaming service that I pay for to watch a old TV show. I was _enraged_ to find out that they put ADS WHERE COMMERCIALS USED TO BE. I thought the whole point of paying was to avoid ads!
so now I visit my used Blu-Ray/DVD store about once a month. they always have buy two/get one free, and the prices are ridiculously low.
is it a better solution? I don't know, but I do know that I don't have to watch those ads anymore.
TurkishPoptart 30 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
satvikpendem 14 hours ago [-]
Problem is the resolution. I don't want to experience paid 480p in a world of free 4k.
Arainach 14 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.
maeln 6 hours ago [-]
The issue with Blu-rays is they are costly to rip. Basically, the only software that let you do it right now is MakeMKV, and it's proprietary. I believe that the VLC team is working on some open-source solutions, but last time I checked, it was only able to read old Blu-ray (which is understandable, they have to care about potential copyright and drm issue, unlike the people behind makemkv).
So if you want to rip recent Blu-ray, you will need to buy makemkv (they do have a 1-month trial tho). But worse, if you want to rip 4k Blu-ray, you will need a specific br-drive that makemkv support (as I understand, they make custom / modified firmware for some drives, allowing to read the protected data). The issue is that there is barely anyone still making br drives and whenever makemkv support one it goes out of stock and/or become extremely expensive on the second hand market.
This is really annoying me because I know this is the end of the physical market for movie. I fully expect Blu-ray to completely die off in a few years. Movie will probably only be available through streaming services, which means it will be harder and harder to get a good quality encoding.
With recent codecs (av1, h265, will see how av2 does), the quality that streaming services is okay, but we are far from what a full Blu-ray dump allows today.
account42 5 hours ago [-]
MakeMKV has an effectively perpetual free trial right now. It's not like old shareware were you have to pay after a month but rahter that you have to feed it a new free activation key every month and maybe wait a couple of days for one to be posted.
That can change (and the official communication is that its only free while in beta) but my guess is that the free beta is the main thing holding back alternatives. MakeMKV does solid work but it's not rocket science and a lot of parts (like all the complementary LibreDrive / UHD firmware work) doesn't even have a paid license check at all.
> I fully expect Blu-ray to completely die off in a few years.
I don't. It might continue to shrink and thereby get more expensive but the distributor market is still very healthy and has more active competition than movie production itself. The biggest danger is disc production but I don't think its impossible to shift that over to a BD-on-USBFlash or whatever else is convenient if needed.
account42 5 hours ago [-]
1080p doesn't really say much when that could be an old DVD-era master with questionable color correction crammed onto a BD25 disc with other features/extras vs a modern archival-quality master professionally encoded to 40+ GB.
It's rare that the latter goes for < $10.
Peacefulz 9 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.
fooqux 5 hours ago [-]
I hate blueray. At least for having physical copies. Too many times I've tried watching something I own only to have it fail due to my player not having current decryption keys. Perhaps it's more of a player issue and less of a disc issue, but it's still a problem with the overall format.
rwmj 2 hours ago [-]
The one time I actually bought a Bluray, I couldn't play it because of fricking Region Coding. Like this is the 2020s and you still have to deal with that BS?!
account42 5 hours ago [-]
MakeMKV hasn't failed me yet. As always, only people fully abiding by corporate rules suffer.
bambax 8 hours 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.
dawnerd 52 minutes ago [-]
Some of ours in the US even have video games. The one I go to even has tools and all sorts of other interesting physical objects. People really need to visit their libraries, they’re already paying for it via taxes.
maeln 6 hours ago [-]
And it is legal to do so ! We pay the "copie privé" tax for that reason.
hoherd 6 hours ago [-]
Same with USA. I was surprised at the variety of platforms supported.
mkesper 6 hours ago [-]
Hmm, public DVDs I know often have read errors.
red-iron-pine 30 minutes ago [-]
but you trust a random torrent upload more?
at least with the library DVDs I can be reasonably certain the weird artifact is not embedded malware, just scratches
abc123abc123 57 minutes ago [-]
What? Rent linux iso:s for free? Good deal!
xrd 10 hours ago [-]
What kind of thrift store sells these? In what country?
achenet 9 hours ago [-]
I suspect "Linux ISOs" are not actual Linux .iso images but ~pirated~ movies, music, and digital books ;)
easyThrowaway 9 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.
mrngld 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, seriously, my intro to linux as a kid was seeing the slick Red Hat boxed media on the shelves at CompUSA.
tomekw 9 hours ago [-]
No way!
emeril 4 hours ago [-]
ding ding ding
fuzztester 6 hours ago [-]
ISOs of what, music or video?
ozozozd 16 hours ago [-]
Thrift stores? Really?
red-iron-pine 29 minutes ago [-]
absolutely. whole walls of old movies, music, whatever.
the really good stuff eventually goes, but there is often a lot of pretty dang good media there too.
check for scratches, tho
AndrewKemendo 16 hours ago [-]
Yes there’s usually a good cache for very cheap though most are scratched up
mewse-hn 16 hours ago [-]
psst, they're talking about movies
sreekanth67 14 hours ago [-]
is this an internet secret code I am missing ?
selcuka 10 hours ago [-]
It's even in the Urban Dictionary [1]:
> Linux ISO: A codeword for copyrighted material shared without permission, usually over P2P networks.
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 12 hours ago [-]
Piracy is legal if you're big enough
stackghost 14 hours ago [-]
Many Linux ISOs are distributed via torrents.
Ask yourself what other types of media can be had on popular torrent sites.
s_dev 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
TurkishPoptart 33 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
JensRantil 4 hours ago [-]
GitHub also has free private repositories, but I guess your server has a much better uptime than them.
jawns 17 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 17 hours ago [-]
"Linux ISOs" is just anything pirated in general.
procinct 16 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.
MrMorden 15 hours ago [-]
All my Linux ISOs are actually FreeBSD.
singingtoday 10 hours ago [-]
Mine are temple OS
mrtree 15 hours ago [-]
[dead]
bambax 8 hours ago [-]
First time I heard this. When did it start? It's pretty funny.
bentley 7 hours 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.
bambax 6 hours ago [-]
Thanks!
16 hours ago [-]
jedberg 18 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 :) ).
physicles 10 hours ago [-]
I use backblaze with restic. Got about 300GB up there, fully encrypted, keys in 1Password.
jp191919 2 hours ago [-]
Same here. It's been very reliable for me.
ehe78qhe 14 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.
orangesilk 6 hours ago [-]
What ist your plan if you die? Do you have a spouse that will be able to read your-and-your-spouses data?
jedberg 14 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 14 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
mrheosuper 14 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 13 hours ago [-]
Proton Drive may work better here?
mrheosuper 12 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 11 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 10 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).
CountGeek 10 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.
Footprint0521 17 hours ago [-]
What happened?? As someone who is currently doing this without backups…
jedberg 14 hours ago [-]
I moved homes and damaged both drives because they traveled together.
Footprint0521 13 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
pava0 11 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 11 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 10 hours ago [-]
RAID is not a backup because anything happening within that file system happens to both drives immediately.
tmountain 10 hours ago [-]
ZFS snapshots can help, but this is one layer of a comprehensive backup strategy.
j45 6 hours ago [-]
both drives? Only 2 mirrored drives isn't really what a RAID can be.
Constructing a RAID5 with 4 drives provides failover and recovery if one of the drives dies.
lultimouomo 4 hours ago [-]
You can have as much redundancy as you like on your RAID, but if you fat finger an rm -r it's all gone.
A real backup protects both against hardware faults and accidental deletion.
j45 2 hours ago [-]
I’m not implying Raid 5 on its own is a complete backup.
Within a storage array though it does provide redundancy at that level, and generally speaking most people don’t access a raid or NAS at a shell level only where they drop rm -fr’s
Separate and offsite backups are non negotiable, however running a raid 5 locally can greatly reduce storage rebuild/restore time, if a single drive fails the rest of the raid continues to work fine until replaced.
egberts1 7 hours ago [-]
I use RAID1 so that each disk can be pulled and used as standalone.
SmashDan 17 hours ago [-]
HDD failure probably
tlavoie 17 hours ago [-]
Or a house fire, or flood...
ostros 7 hours ago [-]
That’s sad :( Where do
You backup offsite now?
unsungNovelty 14 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.
sloum 2 hours ago [-]
Out of curiosity: why use Gitea for personal projects when you can put up raw git repos and run the git-daemon that comes with git? Super lightweight, really functional. Add _cgit_ if you need to be able to view the repos online. Simple and does not require upkeep like gitea (which seems to break with every update and is really heavy).
idinnoaname 1 hours ago [-]
Ive been running a personal gitea instance for nearly 7 years now and have never had anything break with an update, sans user error.
How are you sharing tailscale with your family and friends? do you run the server yourself?
xgulfie 15 hours ago [-]
Tailscale is free for home use and lets you invite people to your network by email
j4kp07 15 hours ago [-]
[dead]
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 20 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 18 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 17 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised you save much space since ISOs are usually stored in already compressed formats
ehe78qhe 14 hours ago [-]
Weirdly, my "Linux ISOs" are compressed in x265 :)
account42 5 hours ago [-]
Which is only marginally more effecient than the H.264 encoding that many of them are delivered in. And the biggest shiniest Linux ISOs already use H.265 out of the box.
bethekidyouwant 16 hours ago [-]
No he means a full length Linux ISO can be as small as 700 MB, I personally prefer 1.4 GB
account42 5 hours ago [-]
I prefer my Linux ISOs to one or two orders of magnitude more fully featured than that.
16 hours ago [-]
mrheosuper 14 hours ago [-]
Does this mean you have to decompress your "ISOs" when you want to watch them ? Does jellyfin support this ?
ehe78qhe 13 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.
account42 5 hours ago [-]
Since Linux ISOs demand random access for a good user experience most of the relevant compression formats support that and so compressing as a blob wouldnt't really get you much but also not prevent individual access.
IG_Semmelweiss 12 hours ago [-]
intriguing list
paulcole 2 days ago [-]
I mean just say you’re pirating…
ehe78qhe 2 days ago [-]
Whaaaaaat? That's illegal! I'm just an OS enthusiast!
Leptonmaniac 20 hours ago [-]
We all enjoy a bit of sailing on the OS (Open Sea)
satvikpendem 14 hours ago [-]
Especially using Sailfish OS
doobiedowner 19 hours ago [-]
Boomers like to prove they can still have fun
leptons 16 hours ago [-]
As a gen-x'er, it's my birthright
tomrod 13 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?
tomrod 1 hours ago [-]
Woof. Folks really hated my joke here :)
red-iron-pine 27 minutes ago [-]
bots, autists, idiots, and possibly people who don't speak english as a first language and miss the in-joke
mrngld 3 hours ago [-]
I use a Raspberry Pi, not a VPS -- as others state, Codex/Claude Code alongside things like Cloudflare and Tailscale make self hosting far easier.
People have commented a lot already, but one thing I do that I haven't seen others already doing yet is I run a news summarization pipeline with Miniflux and Flatnotes.
All my feeds are in one of two categories; Summarize and NoSummarize. Once a day, a script fires at everything unread in the Summarize category, pulls the full text from Miniflux (or calls a scraping service if it appears to only have an article stub), groups similar articles to together with a 60 to 80 word summary, and for everything not grouped together it gives each article a 20 word or so summary. Just enough for me to know if it warrants a full read or not. Then it takes that a posts the digest to a markdown file in a Flatnotes folder. Flatnotes I expose via Tailscale Funnel so I can read it anywhere, including on my work laptop if I'm at the office.
Why Miniflux and Flatnotes and not other options? Mostly because those two are about as lightweight as it gets with still pleasing interfaces and basic features.
josefresco 18 minutes ago [-]
Raspberry Pi 4 8GB in my basement runs:
Jellyfin, Tailscale (to route my Internet when I'm travelling), and 3-4 web app side projects.
While I've considered a VPS for true 24/7 access (and more power), I haven't yet built something critical enough to justify the cost.
Also, Tailscale on a VPS wouldn't serve my travelling needs which are to use my home connection/IP/geo.
chr15m 12 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.
matltc 1 hours ago [-]
Thanks for this goldmine of ideas!
fooqux 5 hours ago [-]
What do you use for you self-hosted calendar and contracts? I'm mostly de-googled but contacts especially have been problematic.
Also, what inference hardware are you using that's so efficient you can do it solar powered?
chr15m 2 hours ago [-]
Nextcloud for calendar and contacts. Android sync with DAVx.
The inference machine is a basic headless gaming PC with a second hand RTX3090 and 64GB RAM.
The solar panels clock 5kW which is mostly fed back into the grid. It's sunny a lot here. The maximum consumption of the PC is 700W and it's mostly idle. Broad strokes we're net positive.
Roelven 8 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
chr15m 2 hours ago [-]
We're like the proverbial kids in the candy store!
ijustlovemath 11 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 10 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.
fooqux 5 hours ago [-]
I use tags. For example, anything with a server tag can accept ingress ssh connections but not egress.
physicles 10 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 9 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 8 hours ago [-]
Are you using the API or is it self hosted as well?
(sorry if this question doesn't make sense)
chr15m 2 hours ago [-]
It is self hosted.
Ollama serves models on an OpenAI compatible API directly on the inference machine, which most open source harness software will connect to. The inference machine has a name like inferencemachine.local on my home network so the Ollama URL looks like http://inference machine:11434/v1 to connect to any model I've downloaded.
throwaway81523 17 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.
hdb2 53 minutes ago [-]
just signed up for TierHive after reading this. I'm really impressed with their transparency on what they are vs what they aren't:
Where do you get it ($4/Year VPS, presumably with IPv4 as it is used for a website) from?
throwaway81523 16 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 16 hours ago [-]
Does that support HTTP/3 with TLS over QUIC (instead of TCP)
throwaway81523 15 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.
9 hours ago [-]
16 hours ago [-]
coolThingsFirst 16 hours ago [-]
Nuts i thought Hetzner had the cheapest options.
oefrha 15 hours ago [-]
Go to LowEndTalk and Hezner will feel like the priciest option. You’ll need a good tolerance for shadiness though.
Loocid 14 hours ago [-]
Having never been on LowEndTalk, what do you mean by shadiness?
oefrha 14 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.
qingcharles 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it's totally hit and miss with some of these providers. Some will try to kill your box once it becomes unprofitable.
I have a free VPS from Oracle that's been running for almost a year now, but I sweat about it regularly as it runs all my analytics.
throwaway81523 14 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 8 hours ago [-]
Upcloud has the cheapest I found, you can get a full VPS for less than $4.
I love interserver.net which starts at $3/mo and has much better network and cpu than providers with twice the specs. I benchmarked a bunch for a hobby project. I also run some professional stuff there (worker servers for https://hedgy.works). Also LAX locations with great ping in California.
BTW I do think this is a golden age for the humble VPS. If you’re daring you can totally let Claude code be your sysadmin.
massysett 8 hours 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.
tempoponet 2 hours ago [-]
I might have said the same thing in 2023, but any coding CLI installed on Linux can rip through this work and keep it updated.
wiether 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
For security you simply setup Tailscale and only allow private network to access your VPS -> 1h max to setup
Maintenance is running upgrades once a week/month -> 10mn
Depending on how critical your data is, you can rely on the provider's backup policy or setting up something as simple as a cron rsync on an external provider -> 2h to setup
sloum 2 hours ago [-]
I have had the same $5 VPS for many years (10-ish?). I mostly use it for websites. As of last night I have 13 websites running on it (down from 18). Most of them probably don't _need_ to have the uptime that the server gives them. I have also done some git hosting on the server, but not so much lately. It is nice to have the server and be able to putt stuff up/take stuff down, self host, write my own tools (I run a pastebin and a kanban board for organizing aspects of my life and remembering things). It works well for me and my use cases. I don't run anyone else's software and I don't use JavaScript for anything, so maintenance is minimal. Occasional Debian updates. It has stayed solid.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai 12 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?
ahf8Aithaex7Nai 6 hours ago [-]
> Can you tell how you configured the tool to accomplish this?
The Yggdrasil client is installed on every computer. I'm running Debian. I have no idea how well it works on Mac or Windows. Yggdrasil assigns a key pair to each computer.
On the VPS, the config is modified in two places:
Listen: [
tcp://[::]:51350
]
This makes the VPS listen for Yggdrasil connections.
This ensures that it only accepts connections from the specified computers. You can also leave that part out. But then any Yggdrasil client out there could connect to your VPS.
Note that this is only the config for the VPS.
I only make one change to the config of the other computers:
Peers: [
tcp://hub.mydomain.tld:51350
]
This causes them to actively connect to the VPS.
> 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?
It depends. If the computers can reach each other on a local network, the Yggdrasil clients will automatically find each other and connect. To do this, you wouldn't have had to change anything in the default configuration. you would simply have had to install and start the Yggdrasil client on the computers.
With NAT in between, they wouldn’t connect on their own. But since they’re configured to actively connect to the hub in any case, they can still see each other via the hub and exchange data even in this scenario. Yggdrasil handles routing and NAT traversal. If both paths are available (locally or via the VPS), Yggdrasil defaults to the local path. But in the general case (where all other computers are behind NAT), all traffic would go through the VPS.
Special case: If only one of the two computers is behind NAT and you want a direct connection, then the accessible computer corresponds to the VPS in the configuration above.
reacharavindh 3 hours ago [-]
This is the first time I am hearing of yggdrasil. I currently have a similar setup using Tailscale. I always thought Wireguard was teh primitive here and Tailscale just made it more convenient in the pointy clicky way. Why Yggdrasil instead of Wireguard which at the outset sounds more standard solution for this need?
tommica 3 hours ago [-]
Neat, thanks for sharing! Seems very convenient!
dpedu 21 minutes ago [-]
Gitea and the self-hosted version of Coder.com. It's the perfect development stack. I can have consistent (and infinite!) development environments no matter which computer I sit down at to work on a project.
throw7 3 hours ago [-]
The main thing for me was having a syncthing node available 24/7. Initially I was hesitant to put one on a 3rd party vps, but there is now an untrusted device mode in beta that I haven't had any problems with so far.
Secondary was for bittorent'ing.
viceconsole 15 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 14 hours ago [-]
What's your strategy for juggling all of these on only 16GB? Docker?
koyote 12 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 9 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 14 hours ago [-]
That all probably fits comfortably in like 12-14GB easily
mrheosuper 14 hours ago [-]
Why do you need both wireguard and ovpn ?
viceconsole 9 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 8 hours ago [-]
Different platforms
Tinker, tailor, ...?
fragmede 13 hours ago [-]
Might as well add Tailscale if there's already those two. And IPSec.
krypdoh 18 minutes ago [-]
I use a < $10/mo seedbox for all of my LINUX ISOs! i get my LINUX ISOs from passthelinux.me, it's my favourite.
ketzu 4 hours ago [-]
Vps:
* kubernetes for learning and a lot of followup just because it enable easy deployment t9 play around witg things (argocd, openbao, uptime kuma, victoriametrics, cnpg/postgres, cloud beaver, traefik)
* keycloak for everything that supports it or can be made to support it without patching it
* personal website (via WordPress)
* grafana for monitoring my side project
* foundry to play DSA with friends
* various small hobby stuff
* best: paperless ngx
The kubernetes infra was a pain to setup once, and a docker manager like portainer would have been enough. It was fun to learn and the declarative argocd flow makes it really easy to deploy small projects to try them out, especially as I can now ask Claude to generate all the yamls, I commit and all is up.
Minipc:
* proxmox host
* home assistant
* open media vault, jelly fin for digital versions of my DVDs because it is easier than using the physical dvds
* past: opencode/Claude dev VMs
* Hermes to play CEO for my side project (just as an advisor, he has little actual connectivity)
* pihole for local dns and adguard
* Caddy for local tls
(half the ram died on my minipc making Claude dev annoying so I moved it to my pc as an on demand vm)
nrdvana 15 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 14 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 12 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 13 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.
seydor 10 minutes ago [-]
Opensimulator 3D world servers
trollbridge 2 hours ago [-]
At this point, nothing. I just moved a workload off a $25 a month VPS because after 6 years of uptime, it went down, the console wouldn’t let us sign in, and their support took hours to contact and get fixed.
It’s simply more cost effective to run your own micro data centre once you have enough workloads. I suppose if you have absolutely no office anywhere and don’t need office Internet, electric, etc. then it’s worth it.
nicbou 8 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.
Damn. Thanks for the amazing work. I used it to get my first-ever appointment in Berlin, around ~2yrs ago.
bawolff 20 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 9 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.
zeroonetwothree 1 hours ago [-]
A single Starbucks coffee in the US is more than $5.
xandrius 8 hours ago [-]
So, you'd get 1/11 of a renting a house in Nepal, so?
keithnz 17 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 16 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 15 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.
bawolff 15 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.
Marsymars 10 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.)
martheen 4 hours ago [-]
Personally I'd just use Cloudflare Pages, unlike GitHub Pages I can let the backing repo private. Maybe OC originally started with GitHub Pages and wants some analytics and filtering with Cloudflare.
zem 15 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.
kaydub 17 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.
WD-42 17 hours ago [-]
You just listed off 3 different services, probably involves even more than that.
Bro has a single server and ssh.
keithnz 16 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 14 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 13 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 15 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 15 hours ago [-]
lol GitHub is down all the time.
prolly97 9 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 :)
modeless 47 minutes ago [-]
Google still has a free tier that includes one small always on VM with a public IPv4 address. So I don't have to justify it in any way. I have two very small personal things hosted on it at the moment.
jbarberu 3 days ago [-]
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.
radu_floricica 6 hours ago [-]
Too many. Ended up getting a $100 physical machine from Hetzner and doing virtualization - was cheaper than keeping all the VPSes.
For starters, a VPS for each claude code project (with a simple orchestrator and project creator).
I'm also playing lowkey with small ESP32 powered automations, and having a VPS to monitor them, show a web interface and push updates. And I've just added a small REPL like module.
nulbyte 5 hours ago [-]
For less than half that, I host my personal email with Postfix and Dovecot. Totally worth it to automate archiving and cut down on spam.
I might also have a really stupid website^H^H^H^Hpage "counting" how many hours of daylight we saved. (Hint: It's just a static page with the number 0 on it.)
Saigonautica 13 hours ago [-]
I host a searchable database of my physical books so that family and friends can search what I've got. Also if they run the same software, I can authorize their instance to work with a primitive inter-library search feature (their library has a public key and signs their request). Fun for book clubs!
It also hosts e-books, primarily so I can load up the website in an ebook reader and download my own books, rather than worry about connecting my reader up via cable and so on.
Also when I'm out, and I find a maybe interesting book, I can check if I have it or (if the price is too high) add it to my wishlist. Similar for relatives who wish to buy me a book. I live in Asia but primarily read in English, so I do have to capitalize on opportunities to buy books when they arise.
It's open-source, I've been running it a few years, you can use it if you like. It runs on a potato, so your 5$ VPS will be able to host several other things at the same time:
Personal life (not critical thinks) I use home server and pretty reliable.
If there is concern about uptime then I choice a vendor to handle.
But home server more cheap, and performant if you have good connection and reliable power (not ups, just a city infrastructure)
droobles 1 hours ago [-]
I think it's free tier but a reverse ssh tunnel for my gaming server, it's pretty locked down and easy enough to standup gaming servers for my friends. Hamachi would be feasible but it gives me a headache each time.
PeterStuer 5 hours ago [-]
In my case Pangolin as a secured gateway to my homelab services.
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.
bthallplz 22 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).
hmng 4 hours ago [-]
First time I hear of Actual Budget, will have a look.
dbmikus 55 minutes ago [-]
I love homelab stuff and self-hosting. Writing software is my job, but tinkering with computers + devops is my hobby
I have a media server I run on a spare desktop, and at one point was messing around with https://syncthing.net/ for a self-hosted form of Dropbox. More recently, I'm using a VPS to run some internet scraping jobs for things I want to monitor, like apartment listings in NYC (where I live).
Of course, I also use this to run long-running cloud coding agents! Basically exactly what DHH's AI shed is. You need something stronger than $5-$10 / month VPS. I connect with https://herdr.dev/ for persistence
Because of how relevant the "AI shed" concept is, I would be remiss to mention my startup: https://www.amika.dev/
Amika lets you turn any computer into an always-on, network-connectable, AI shed. It's not ready for primetime quite yet (beta launching soon), but I use it for all my dev work
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.
equinumerous 13 hours ago [-]
I would be terrified of the server being breached and having my passwords/key material leaked.
oarfish 13 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.
iaaan 13 hours ago [-]
Where is it hosted that costs a few cents per month?
what 13 hours ago [-]
Uh, where are you getting a “cloud VM” for a few cents per month?
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.
fooqux 5 hours ago [-]
There are great clients for both phones and windows machines.
SyzygyRhythm 12 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.
droidjj 15 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.
An external uptime monitor seems like a useful fit for a small VPS: it can check whether your home server or websites are reachable even when your laptop is off.
assimpleaspossi 17 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 15 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.
assimpleaspossi 2 hours ago [-]
These were smaller theatre companies, about 100 seats if I recall, that didn't have assigned seating. I built the ticketing system myself.
Maintenance is not an issue, if vm/pc setup is done correctly. Simple is better in that case. Just a docker-compose or two or three with app data stored directly on disk to be able to move things easily between VM/PC's if needed. If hosted on VPS, set up your containers to be accesible only through VPN and you're good to go.
Things i use daily-ish:
- Wireguard with wg-easy to access my home network and other way around to keep services i don't want to be seen on my network away from my ISP.
- Calibre-web for my ebooks
- Forgejo/Gitea as local git server + CrowCI for my hobby projects.
- Samba server to access my things over the network.
- Trillium for note taking.
- Nomad for my other more infra related projects
neilmovva 8 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 wrote this in another thread recently, but I started using my mac-mini, which was lying around for being a GitHub action runner.
I think it's saving me about $8 to $10 a day that I was previously spending on GH Actions.
VERY worth it.
weberer 4 hours ago [-]
I have a server that's now my Claude Code development machine, as well as a host server for the various tools I develop. Its only accessible over my tailnet.
I uninstalled Claude Code from my laptop after an incident where it got stuck on an issue and started scanning my home folder for resources. Its unacceptable and scary behavior, so now it gets it own machine where it can't touch my keys.
itintheory 3 hours ago [-]
Going to ask this here, but not sure there's a great answer. My 'homelab' runs mullvad over which I download my Linux ISOs. I tried to set up tailscale, with headscale on a $5 VPS, but the multiple VPN interfaces seemed like a challenge. Is this doable?
AMD_DRIVERS 3 hours ago [-]
Pangolin. It beats exposing your home network directly, instead have Pangolin be the front door.
0x262d 20 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.
huijzer 7 hours 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)
overcast 4 hours ago [-]
A $4 a month personal private movie logging project for my friends and family. Was a pain to keep up with everyone's emails and text messages about what they were watching, or what they recommend. Simple, and serves its purpose wonderfully. https://mymovielog.com
totetsu 2 hours ago [-]
A small site that tracks and repost the availability of $5 Hetzner vps instances.
JamesLeonis 10 hours ago [-]
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.
horsawlarway 3 hours ago [-]
bookstack
keycloak
immich
jellyfin
several personal sites
home assistant
unsloth studio
several synology tools on a nas (drive/security/backups)
etc...
If it's "just you" your laptop is likely fine. Hosted tools really start to shine when you've got a group of folks using them. Ex - Wife/Parents/Kids/Extended Family.
Simple k3s cluster and the shallow end of kubernetes actually saves you a ton of time and effort (don't go into complex orchestrators or helm charts - just write small deployments in static yaml). You can get to roughly the same spot with just docker/compose if you want, but the capabilities cap out earlier (ex - multi-machine, resilient to any one machine going down, gpu sharding, etc)
Maintenance is basically "sudo pacman -Syyu" on a cron job.
Daegalus 4 hours ago [-]
Tangled Knots and Spindles
Uptime Kuma
Umami analytics
Netbird
Linklater
Miniflux
Seafile
A few other small apps
The rest lives on my NAS or Rock 5B as it deals with large data, backups, pictures, etc. Like Jellyfin, Immich and supporting tooling.
- 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)
skybrian 18 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.
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 $100 second hand thin client running KVM is used for:
- Home Assistant
- Immich photo hosting
- Music Assistant
- Pihole
- Hister
- Invidious
Obviously the storage requirements for media and photos are higher, these go to a (more expensive) Synology NAS, and are backed up externally, but that's beyond the scope of this post. The Home Assistant + Pihole storage requirements are minimal.
elias_t 8 hours ago [-]
Wow that’s really cheap. Are the VPS reliable?
lode 8 hours ago [-]
suprisingly so... Haven't had any unplanned downtime in a couple of years. (But as I mentioned, I treat them as disposable and wouldn't miss anything if they disappeared suddenly.)
elias_t 2 hours ago [-]
Yes I guess, thanks for the tip!
wraptile 8 hours ago [-]
These VPS no longer make much sense for self-hosting imo. I have two refurbished 32gb ram Lenovo k14 laptops (250$ 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 8 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 7 hours 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.
xandrius 5 hours ago [-]
Are you calling my hardware old? ;(
kilroy123 5 hours ago [-]
I strongly agree. Plus, personally, I wouldn't put a box online. I have a desktop at home that I keep off the internet. I only connect to it via ZeroTier.
pan69 17 hours ago [-]
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 17 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.
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.
floydnoel 3 hours ago [-]
I used a $5 VPS to host https://bongo.to for 5 years. works great for small project hosting!
elAhmo 3 hours ago [-]
I have a few statically hosted websites, but primarily I use it to host my self-hosted instance of plausible.io
layer8 3 hours ago [-]
Self-hosted email is the biggest one for me. And in general having a server that’s accessible from everywhere and is never down.
nha1 7 hours ago [-]
I run https://klar.im/ on slightly more but the VPS is $5–10/month for a total bill under $20.
Two spot VPS on GCP hosting bespoke besedka chat with bob ai agent (test and prod). Both backup their data to R2 so spot disruption is minimal.
And I don't pay for it, as Google AI Pro (former Google One) subscription gives me 10$ monthly GCP credits that cover two spot instances bill.
paweladamczuk 5 hours ago [-]
- Navidrome
- Jellyfin
- Vaultwarden
- Immich
- pi agent. I use it through tmux and iSH on my iPhone
- librechat. nice UI but honestly I probably jsut use pi more often
- copyparty. to visually inspect whatever I create with pi, and to access my documents, to upload files I need on the server quickly and easily from any device
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)
meteyor 8 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.
whitef0x 3 hours ago [-]
I use pikapods so more like a managed VPS but I run bitwarden along with a photos app on the server which is worth it to me
mindwork 1 days 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 17 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?
mindwork 1 hours ago [-]
Authentication and securing meetings is a point of friction in Jitsi. I wouldn't go that far to call it intentional. But if it is - I'm okay with that. Since it's open-source, somebody have to make money to keep developing software and pay bills at the same time.
On many occasions I found it annoying that auth cookies expire after a day or less. And the most confusing thing for me is that it doesn't work well with 1Password, so I had to type my passwords like a caveman.
I solved it in few ways:
* I added common rooms to the bookmarks so I can quickly host them
* I added another user for my partner so she can host meetings too.
* Since it's open source, I changed the code so that auth cookies stay active for 30 days, instead of 1 day.
* Just this morning I've been exploring mobile version of Jitsi meet, where you can click on room name in 'Recents' and join quicker. This is a win for non-technical members of our family.
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 2 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.
jletts 2 days ago [-]
It can vary, I did it for a few years with no issues or deliverability problems
Lammy 18 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 16 hours ago [-]
You never really know though, do you? Some things are ending up in spam and you don't know which ones.
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 20 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.
agnishom 14 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 14 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 14 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 12 hours ago [-]
> You have to buy a DNS name for your public IP
What are you talking about?
ehe78qhe 12 hours ago [-]
If you want TLS for your websites/webapps you're gonna need a DNS name to get a cert
cubesnooper 9 hours ago [-]
No, Let’s Encrypt provides IP address certificates for free.
weberer 4 hours ago [-]
Interesting, apparently they added that as a feature a few months 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.
chowchowchow 17 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 15 hours ago [-]
$10/mo buys 7 vCPU Cores and 8gb ram which is not bad at all.
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.
Also have my resume and other such projects on the server
bingo-bongo 12 hours ago [-]
My setup is a bit over the top, but I like tinkering and build a lot of odd projects:
3x$5VPS: Garage S3 cluster for static sites and project builds, behind haproxy. Also runs Postgres w/ patroni and a small game server for a game I’m working on and some nameservers.
My website is on all 3 VMs and has a little gimmick, where state is tracked between them.
3xOld MiniPC: Proxmox cluster for running Gitlab+Runners, monitoring vm, Valheim server, Syncthing, plus a couple of other odd projects. The oldest hw is probably close to 10 years old (NUC7) and the other two is refurbished Lenovo M710q I think, so nothing fancy.
Everything is connected- and communicate over Tailscale.
gediz 17 hours ago [-]
I have a 8€ storage VPS from Alpha VPS. It's far from a beefy machine. Hosting it for a few years so far. It has a blog generated with Hugo, WireGuard Easy VPN for me and my friends, Forgejo for a few small repos, SFTPGo for files. Even VPN hosting itself saves me and my friend maybe around 50$ a month. Maintenance is easy, and even easier after AI. Definitely worth it.
SmashDan 17 hours ago [-]
$50 a month for vpn?!
gediz 45 minutes ago [-]
I mean, cumulatively :) sorry for not being very clear
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.
asim 10 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.
monk_grilla 17 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.
TradeStarInside 15 minutes ago [-]
We went the other way. A Raspberry Pi at home, a Cloudflare Tunnel in front, no VPS. It serves a public API over SEC Form 4 purchases.
robwayne 16 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 10 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 7 hours ago [-]
I'm curious why do you need manual intervention after a power cut. Isn't configuring bios enough for this?
throwawayk7h 16 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 11 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 16 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 16 hours ago [-]
Cloudflare tunnels work pretty well for this, tho. That with vlan or diff lan and it’s mostly fine.
z2 13 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.
returningfory2 16 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.
Bastion host! My home servers do all the heavy lifting and then go through the VPS as a sacrificial server
sdcfgy 5 hours ago [-]
I use an old desktop PC.
Runs IRC bouncer, some scraping jobs, samba server for the family (mostly music and films), backs up our IMAP boxes (on iCloud and other providers).
lelanthran 12 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...
nunodonato 3 hours ago [-]
My blog/website, my tiny code experiments, my ai agent.
kaydub 17 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.
xtracto 12 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 9 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.
Agingcoder 9 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.
ro_bit 14 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 14 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.
ro_bit 6 hours ago [-]
Pretty minimal benefit honestly. I just did this because at the time the youtube uploader my ShareX client had was broken
mycofunguy 17 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 16 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 14 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 13 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!
mycofunguy 6 hours ago [-]
We're only accepting bank transfers and cash in post on this site. I won't pretend it's purely to reduce the attack surface, but we couldn't use most payment processors even if we wanted to as some of our products are deemed 'High Risk' - the magic mushroom spores.
Answered above, thanks for the interest! Really appreciated.
tryauuum 3 hours ago [-]
- dht network crawler, to have your own index of torrents
- vpn exit node
- personal email server
znpy 49 minutes ago [-]
I mainly run stuff at home, but i have a server in a datacenter mainly for hosting the public enpoint of my vpn network.
Also, over there, i run my monitoring stack (prometheus+grafana etc) since it's the most stable part of my infra in terms of networking and power supply).
letmetweakit 4 hours ago [-]
An AlgoVPN server. At least, I did that some years ago, not sure if AlgoVPN is still a thing.
AnotherGoodName 14 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 12 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 11 hours ago [-]
Yes - Tailscale packages it up nicely and they even have an apple TV app.
sebnun 3 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.
Oracle's free tier ARM VM's specs were recently halved so now they only give ARMs with 2 CPUs and 12GB of RAM [0].
Still great value though, have my app's website and associated infra on one of those 4CPU/24GB in "pay-as-you-go" mode and never ever reached the paying threshold.
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
kitsune_cw 9 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 9 hours ago [-]
OpenRouter has its own chat UI so the benefit is unclear to me.
m00dy 8 hours ago [-]
Benefit is none
Thev00d00 2 hours ago [-]
Where do you even get a $5 VPS nowadays?!
2 days ago [-]
alprado50 10 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.
xujizhong 3 hours ago [-]
I can't think of any other use for it besides a VPN.
petercooper 8 hours 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.)
kristianp 6 hours ago [-]
My VPS was collecting financial data for backtesting until recently. Daily rclone moves completed files to a non amazon S3 clone.
ExtremisAndy 15 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!
olivierduval 8 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)
jamiepond 8 hours ago [-]
`ssh ssh.cowsinlove.com` is an extension of https://cowsinlove.com. game coming soon. -- edit, formatting
toxic 13 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 13 hours ago [-]
what do you do with all these domains ?
toxic 13 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.
hirako2000 18 hours ago [-]
- gonic (audio streaming server)
- file-browser (a google drive clone)
- prisme (photo library)
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.
edarchis 10 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
pathly 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
pathly 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
davekubehub 16 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.
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.
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.
masfuerte 18 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 17 hours ago [-]
LowEndBox often lists similar VPSes if anyone here is interested
kaydub 17 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
Nero200 8 hours ago [-]
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.
fak3r 21 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.
icar 7 hours ago [-]
Whatever I need it to do for my current project. Right now, a crawler for a relatively niche search engine.
dvdyzag 12 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.
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.
mrheosuper 14 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 14 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
coldstartops 9 hours ago [-]
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.)
rpdillon 20 hours ago [-]
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.
justsomehuman 17 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 16 hours ago [-]
This is a good list of things
mrinterweb 18 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 16 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 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 10 hours ago [-]
Do you curl the file onto the VPS and then scp or do you open a tunnel ?
ogou 3 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.
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.
dare944 3 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.
jxdxbx 13 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.
MisterMunchkin 17 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)
nickpsecurity 2 hours ago [-]
All my domains run on different, $5 droplets. Even if money is tight, I keep two up that lead to saved souls and transformed lives:
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.
skipkey 13 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.
anakaiti 15 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.
gullevek 11 hours ago [-]
- IRC
- RSS
- GIT
- other private web page for certain things (weather, some date/time stats for birthdays, etc)
- private link/content share
ceritium 20 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.
bradly 15 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
ramon156 9 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
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.
anticorporate 16 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 15 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure you could accomplish this with a free DDNS, like DuckDNS.
anticorporate 2 hours ago [-]
I could, but the security model would be different. Caddy plus my WireGuard configuration buys me some additional isolation and peace of mind. My VPS is always configured to be as locked down as I need it; I don't want to have to remember that I got high last night and did something funky to my local firewall.
pkulak 14 hours ago [-]
Set up a family chat, with a built-in helper agent?
I have a gitolite server on a scaleway VPS, but it's only about $1 a month.
axus 18 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.
ivraatiems 17 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.
daitangio 11 hours ago [-]
Mail server + static site + isso comment server
Owning your email is nice, and save you sone bucks if you want family accounts.
ThatPlayer 16 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 16 hours ago [-]
A gnu screen session hosting an irc client so I can stay connected.
denkmoon 18 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.
hn_submit 9 hours ago [-]
Static and dynamic websites, VPN, email server, blog, testing of web applications.
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
Traubenfuchs 9 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.
Venn1 16 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.
17 hours ago [-]
andOlga 2 days ago [-]
Exit node for friends in countries with internet censorship. Specific use case, but it is mine.
hackernud3s 16 hours ago [-]
DC ips are the worst for web browsing. You think captcha is annoying now, just wait until you try exiting through one of those.
meken 15 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 11 hours ago [-]
Well you could host it in a containerized app service like AWS's Fargate and it would still be considered serverless.
jeanpah 13 hours ago [-]
I ran several customers webpages, blogs, Even bussines aplications, still do, Sqlite is awesome.
JDSP 9 hours ago [-]
MediaMTX so I can stream to it in whatever quality I want
lanstin 18 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 17 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
VariousPrograms 18 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.
VonLuderitz 5 hours ago [-]
My own VPN (wireguard)
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.
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.
johnisgood 15 hours ago [-]
Personal website with a public git repository. Maintenance costs in time, not much though.
chapz 19 hours ago [-]
Transmission, Tailscale, Glance Homepage and NginxProxy which points to my local PC and the rest of the services running there.
cutthegrass2 2 days ago [-]
a container image with a wireguard server plus a bunch of host configuration scripts to automate the setup.
Handy to have a non commercial VPN solution you can deploy in any region.
archerx 7 hours 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.
Sha1rholder 3 days ago [-]
Deploy a vpn
spcebar 2 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.
CTOSian 8 hours ago [-]
miniflux RSS , on the "free" google compute engine, it's great for this.
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.
DeluluDon 19 hours ago [-]
A Reticulum Network Stack transport node that's geographically strategic. I liked the idea behind it.
edumucelli 5 hours ago [-]
Pihole + OpenVPN
pirateirl 4 hours ago [-]
Hermes agent
mceleri 19 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.
- All of my websites and the back ends of some apps I've developed
- A torrent client so I can seed torrents to keep my ratio positive
Keeping my namecheap API key on the server means every time I make a new website I just buy the domain and tell my AI agent to SSH in and set everything up.
ur-whale 4 hours ago [-]
> What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?
DNS servers
[EDIT]: wireguard node for my private VPN
keithnz 17 hours ago [-]
I run a discord bot for my dota2 guild, works well, deployed as a container
cubesnooper 9 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).
stego-tech 5 hours ago [-]
I got some Intel Atom NUCs on discount back in the good times for $170 each; 4 cores, 16GB RAM.
Right now one of them hosts the following:
* Jellyfin for my physical disc collection
* Ergo for an IRC server daemon
* A vibe-coded project that lets folks upload images and stick them to a canvas like stickers on a light pole (great for memes)
* Caddy as a reverse proxy
* Pocket-ID for passkey-auth
* LLDAP for crustier directory auth (like Jellyfin)
* FreshRSS for an RSS aggregator
* RSS-Bridge as a support
…and a smattering of in-progress projects. Honestly lamenting not grabbing a $5 Hetzner VPC when they were available so my public services could live out there, but I’m an edge case.
My advice is less to think about justifying it now, and more thinking “would I get $60/yr worth of enjoyment or utility from a VM in a real datacenter somewhere?” In that context, you’ll almost certainly get utility from that by year’s end - and if not, you’re only out the $60.
5ak3t 6 hours ago [-]
not necessarily 24/7. on demand smaller boxes for agents, kill once the work is done.
ehwa37 13 hours ago [-]
CS 1.6 server
mwham 17 hours ago [-]
Are all these people saying Hermes bots or something?
hmyn 11 hours ago [-]
it starts with something then it is just hard not to have any more
eternaut 7 hours ago [-]
calibre library with over 1300 books
dzonga 16 hours ago [-]
if I wanna experiment on a server this days - use old laptop.
my workloads are suited to serverless platforms like Cloudflare.
small_model 16 hours ago [-]
I train my 20T parameter model on mine.
ikidd 16 hours ago [-]
It'll be done around the time of the heat death of the universe.
theodric 6 hours ago [-]
I have a Racknerd VPS that's $20/year, and it hosts a couple personal websites, an Outline instance, and is the Wireguard hub for all my NAT'd sites.
BiteCode_dev 7 hours ago [-]
Bimdump.com.
It's just a gtd inbox and consumes nothing, but I can just empty my mind and save my adhd brain from drifting to all those butteflies.
_nhh 3 hours ago [-]
teamspeak3
tylerhillery 5 hours ago [-]
pypacktrends.com
Kim_Bruning 2 days ago [-]
Right this minute I've got wireguard and caddy up.
alg0rith 9 hours ago [-]
A discord bot
1vuio0pswjnm7 3 days ago [-]
1. Authoritative DNS server
2. Rendezvous server ("supernode")
curious_cat_163 18 hours ago [-]
I recently started an AT Proto PDS.
kidnoodle 9 hours ago [-]
An alternative interface I built for my kids’ Yoto players which adds an intercom feature so I can broadcast messages like “Come have breakfast!” without yelling upstairs.
A computer professional should have at least 1 vps online 24/7 in the same way a plumber should have a wrench.
Just spending thinking juice on whether you should spend 5$/mo on a server is already a huge issue, just do it and in general increase your investment in proffessional tooling.
i use the oracle x86 1gb ram to host php and static websites.
ant0ni 5 hours ago [-]
nethack!
solnyshok 18 hours ago [-]
tailscale, onedrive, smb, transmission, torrserver, stremio server
runnr_az 20 hours ago [-]
finger.farm finger server...
wila 10 hours ago [-]
PowerDNS
browningstreet 2 days ago [-]
Hermes and an Orca dev server
sigbottle 17 hours ago [-]
Self hosting nebula
fragmede 2 days ago [-]
Factorio server
nekusar 14 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.
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.
AndrewKemendo 16 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
dyauspitr 18 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 20 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).
robotnikman 17 hours ago [-]
reverse proxy
walrus01 7 hours ago [-]
tertiary authoritative nameserver on another continent
gspr 14 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 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah someones political opinions are relevant to whether someone should use a VPS or not...
gspr 7 hours 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.
calvinmorrison 18 hours ago [-]
website yes but what about irc bouncer?
justsomehnguy 19 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.
maheshkumarbal1 56 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
virrdhiman 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
bazingaedward 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dlphii 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
sidehub 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
borisPupchenko 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ziranbing 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
PoKeRGT 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
antihero 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
jantuss 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
borisPupchenko 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
rainymoon 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
caniload 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
greshev 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
zhangchioulin 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
lee1012 15 hours ago [-]
[dead]
newswasboring 16 hours ago [-]
[dead]
icybear 11 hours ago [-]
[dead]
billgates666 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
Computer0 3 days ago [-]
[flagged]
ReDress 10 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 :-)
- 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.”
I initially used WireGuard, but as my home lab scaled, it became unwieldy. Some people could work around these limitations with bash scripts, but if you have an heterogeneous environment (esp iOS clients), making programmatic configuration changes to WireGuard becomes trickier.
Today I use Tailscale (with Headscale as the control plane) for all users, and WireGuard as a emergency access to key servers.
And a damned good one at that. I can spend five minutes on a (family) nontechnical user's device and set it up to be able to access the parts of my network it needs to get to, and it's easy enough to use that I can walk them through the troubleshooting over the phone if it ever goes awry. Regardless of where they are or I am.
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.
What is Tailscale getting that my ISP and google/Facebook via their pixels and tracking scripts aren't?
Like? What exactly could they plausibly do, that I should care about, if I otherwise have no reason to worry about these institutions?
In case you were not aware, spooks have focused on metadata analysis over "full take" (data) analysis for a very long time because they are far more effective and require less data to analyse. This has been the case at least since the early 2000s with Stellar Wind but arguably even the Stasi worked this way -- they cared a lot more about who you were talking to than what you were talking about. The Snowden revelations in 2013 talked almost entirely about metadata-only systems that were being used to invasively surveil the world.
If your point was more "I have nothing to hide" then you can find plenty of articles online to disabuse you of that notion. There's even a Wikipedia article about it[2].
[1]: https://abcnews.com/blogs/headlines/2014/05/ex-nsa-chief-we-... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
Can I even hide from NSA level adversaries without employing extreme methods? Assuming "no", then for this particular threat model do the tools employed next matter?
But there is a bigger point to be made: in my experience most privacy activists argue that taking an absolutist stance personally is counter-productive -- just because it is almost impossible to completely eliminate risks from your life does not mean you should give up and not try to minimise them. And of course, the goal for most people isn't to protect against targeted attacks (since that means you already need to take fugitive-on-the-run-level precautions), it's to avoid becoming a target in the first place.
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/
https://sanctorum.se
> no mobile clients
I know of some people however who hacked up their own using the sanctum library (https://github.com/jorisvink/libkyrka)
Definitely a place for both services, IMO.
a few months back I opened up a streaming service that I pay for to watch a old TV show. I was _enraged_ to find out that they put ADS WHERE COMMERCIALS USED TO BE. I thought the whole point of paying was to avoid ads!
so now I visit my used Blu-Ray/DVD store about once a month. they always have buy two/get one free, and the prices are ridiculously low.
is it a better solution? I don't know, but I do know that I don't have to watch those ads anymore.
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.
So if you want to rip recent Blu-ray, you will need to buy makemkv (they do have a 1-month trial tho). But worse, if you want to rip 4k Blu-ray, you will need a specific br-drive that makemkv support (as I understand, they make custom / modified firmware for some drives, allowing to read the protected data). The issue is that there is barely anyone still making br drives and whenever makemkv support one it goes out of stock and/or become extremely expensive on the second hand market.
This is really annoying me because I know this is the end of the physical market for movie. I fully expect Blu-ray to completely die off in a few years. Movie will probably only be available through streaming services, which means it will be harder and harder to get a good quality encoding. With recent codecs (av1, h265, will see how av2 does), the quality that streaming services is okay, but we are far from what a full Blu-ray dump allows today.
That can change (and the official communication is that its only free while in beta) but my guess is that the free beta is the main thing holding back alternatives. MakeMKV does solid work but it's not rocket science and a lot of parts (like all the complementary LibreDrive / UHD firmware work) doesn't even have a paid license check at all.
> I fully expect Blu-ray to completely die off in a few years.
I don't. It might continue to shrink and thereby get more expensive but the distributor market is still very healthy and has more active competition than movie production itself. The biggest danger is disc production but I don't think its impossible to shift that over to a BD-on-USBFlash or whatever else is convenient if needed.
It's rare that the latter goes for < $10.
at least with the library DVDs I can be reasonably certain the weird artifact is not embedded malware, just scratches
the really good stuff eventually goes, but there is often a lot of pretty dang good media there too.
check for scratches, tho
> 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.
Constructing a RAID5 with 4 drives provides failover and recovery if one of the drives dies.
A real backup protects both against hardware faults and accidental deletion.
Within a storage array though it does provide redundancy at that level, and generally speaking most people don’t access a raid or NAS at a shell level only where they drop rm -fr’s
Separate and offsite backups are non negotiable, however running a raid 5 locally can greatly reduce storage rebuild/restore time, if a single drive fails the rest of the raid continues to work fine until replaced.
~10W is what my socket reports for regular use on the M2 Pro.
They are not cheap anymore, unfortunately, but at least you get much more performance out of them than you would from some $5 VPS.
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/
People have commented a lot already, but one thing I do that I haven't seen others already doing yet is I run a news summarization pipeline with Miniflux and Flatnotes.
All my feeds are in one of two categories; Summarize and NoSummarize. Once a day, a script fires at everything unread in the Summarize category, pulls the full text from Miniflux (or calls a scraping service if it appears to only have an article stub), groups similar articles to together with a 60 to 80 word summary, and for everything not grouped together it gives each article a 20 word or so summary. Just enough for me to know if it warrants a full read or not. Then it takes that a posts the digest to a markdown file in a Flatnotes folder. Flatnotes I expose via Tailscale Funnel so I can read it anywhere, including on my work laptop if I'm at the office.
Why Miniflux and Flatnotes and not other options? Mostly because those two are about as lightweight as it gets with still pleasing interfaces and basic features.
Jellyfin, Tailscale (to route my Internet when I'm travelling), and 3-4 web app side projects.
While I've considered a VPS for true 24/7 access (and more power), I haven't yet built something critical enough to justify the cost.
Also, Tailscale on a VPS wouldn't serve my travelling needs which are to use my home connection/IP/geo.
- 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.
Also, what inference hardware are you using that's so efficient you can do it solar powered?
The inference machine is a basic headless gaming PC with a second hand RTX3090 and 64GB RAM.
The solar panels clock 5kW which is mostly fed back into the grid. It's sunny a lot here. The maximum consumption of the PC is 700W and it's mostly idle. Broad strokes we're net positive.
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)
Ollama serves models on an OpenAI compatible API directly on the inference machine, which most open source harness software will connect to. The inference machine has a name like inferencemachine.local on my home network so the Ollama URL looks like http://inference machine:11434/v1 to connect to any model I've downloaded.
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.
https://tierhive.com/about.php
I have a free VPS from Oracle that's been running for almost a year now, but I sweat about it regularly as it runs all my analytics.
- family ai knowledge / data store MCP https://setoku.com/
I love interserver.net which starts at $3/mo and has much better network and cpu than providers with twice the specs. I benchmarked a bunch for a hobby project. I also run some professional stuff there (worker servers for https://hedgy.works). Also LAX locations with great ping in California.
BTW I do think this is a golden age for the humble VPS. If you’re daring you can totally let Claude code be your sysadmin.
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.
Maintenance is running upgrades once a week/month -> 10mn
Depending on how critical your data is, you can rely on the provider's backup policy or setting up something as simple as a cron rsync on an external provider -> 2h to setup
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?
The Yggdrasil client is installed on every computer. I'm running Debian. I have no idea how well it works on Mac or Windows. Yggdrasil assigns a key pair to each computer.
On the VPS, the config is modified in two places:
This makes the VPS listen for Yggdrasil connections. This ensures that it only accepts connections from the specified computers. You can also leave that part out. But then any Yggdrasil client out there could connect to your VPS.Note that this is only the config for the VPS.
I only make one change to the config of the other computers:
This causes them to actively connect to the VPS.> 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?
It depends. If the computers can reach each other on a local network, the Yggdrasil clients will automatically find each other and connect. To do this, you wouldn't have had to change anything in the default configuration. you would simply have had to install and start the Yggdrasil client on the computers.
With NAT in between, they wouldn’t connect on their own. But since they’re configured to actively connect to the hub in any case, they can still see each other via the hub and exchange data even in this scenario. Yggdrasil handles routing and NAT traversal. If both paths are available (locally or via the VPS), Yggdrasil defaults to the local path. But in the general case (where all other computers are behind NAT), all traffic would go through the VPS.
Special case: If only one of the two computers is behind NAT and you want a direct connection, then the accessible computer corresponds to the VPS in the configuration above.
Secondary was for bittorent'ing.
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.
Minipc:
(half the ram died on my minipc making Claude dev annoying so I moved it to my pc as an on demand vm)It’s simply more cost effective to run your own micro data centre once you have enough workloads. I suppose if you have absolutely no office anywhere and don’t need office Internet, electric, etc. then it’s worth it.
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
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'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.)
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.
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 :)
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.
For starters, a VPS for each claude code project (with a simple orchestrator and project creator).
I'm also playing lowkey with small ESP32 powered automations, and having a VPS to monitor them, show a web interface and push updates. And I've just added a small REPL like module.
I might also have a really stupid website^H^H^H^Hpage "counting" how many hours of daylight we saved. (Hint: It's just a static page with the number 0 on 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
https://github.com/fosrl/pangolin
It’s definitely a way to get a competitive advantage over others that rely on more traditional architecture.
The main apps I run are Actual Budget (YNAB alternative), Wallabag (read-it-later service), and FreshRSS (RSS aggregator).
I've also been using the VPS to run some scripts daily for my planet site(s): they ingest RSS feeds, regenerate the static site files, and push the files to my static site host (https://pgs.sh) instead of worrying about hosting them myself (threatening the VPS's apps).
I have a media server I run on a spare desktop, and at one point was messing around with https://syncthing.net/ for a self-hosted form of Dropbox. More recently, I'm using a VPS to run some internet scraping jobs for things I want to monitor, like apartment listings in NYC (where I live).
Of course, I also use this to run long-running cloud coding agents! Basically exactly what DHH's AI shed is. You need something stronger than $5-$10 / month VPS. I connect with https://herdr.dev/ for persistence
Because of how relevant the "AI shed" concept is, I would be remiss to mention my startup: https://www.amika.dev/
Amika lets you turn any computer into an always-on, network-connectable, AI shed. It's not ready for primetime quite yet (beta launching soon), but I use it for all my dev work
It's partially open source, which is here: https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika
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.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightscout
https://spacefightinggame.com/
I picked a dumb name though, open to suggestions!
Things i use daily-ish:
- Wireguard with wg-easy to access my home network and other way around to keep services i don't want to be seen on my network away from my ISP.
- Calibre-web for my ebooks
- Forgejo/Gitea as local git server + CrowCI for my hobby projects.
- Samba server to access my things over the network.
- Trillium for note taking.
- Nomad for my other more infra related projects
[0]: https://docs.sailresearch.com/sailboxes
I think it's saving me about $8 to $10 a day that I was previously spending on GH Actions.
VERY worth it.
I uninstalled Claude Code from my laptop after an incident where it got stuck on an issue and started scanning my home folder for resources. Its unacceptable and scary behavior, so now it gets it own machine where it can't touch my keys.
- 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)
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.
keycloak
immich
jellyfin
several personal sites
home assistant
unsloth studio
several synology tools on a nas (drive/security/backups)
etc...
If it's "just you" your laptop is likely fine. Hosted tools really start to shine when you've got a group of folks using them. Ex - Wife/Parents/Kids/Extended Family.
Simple k3s cluster and the shallow end of kubernetes actually saves you a ton of time and effort (don't go into complex orchestrators or helm charts - just write small deployments in static yaml). You can get to roughly the same spot with just docker/compose if you want, but the capabilities cap out earlier (ex - multi-machine, resilient to any one machine going down, gpu sharding, etc)
Maintenance is basically "sudo pacman -Syyu" on a cron job.
[0]: https://linkding.link/
- 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)
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/
- 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.
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.
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!
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.
I wrote about it a couple days ago actually https://klar.im/blog/launch-a-startup-for-15-euros-a-month
- Jellyfin
- Vaultwarden
- Immich
- pi agent. I use it through tmux and iSH on my iPhone
- librechat. nice UI but honestly I probably jsut use pi more often
- copyparty. to visually inspect whatever I create with pi, and to access my documents, to upload files I need on the server quickly and easily from any device
Jitsi instance is working all the time and ready to connect 24/7.
On many occasions I found it annoying that auth cookies expire after a day or less. And the most confusing thing for me is that it doesn't work well with 1Password, so I had to type my passwords like a caveman.
I solved it in few ways:
* I added common rooms to the bookmarks so I can quickly host them
* I added another user for my partner so she can host meetings too.
* Since it's open source, I changed the code so that auth cookies stay active for 30 days, instead of 1 day.
* Just this morning I've been exploring mobile version of Jitsi meet, where you can click on room name in 'Recents' and join quicker. This is a win for non-technical members of our family.
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.
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?
https://letsencrypt.org/2026/01/15/6day-and-ip-general-avail...
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.
That, plus tailscale and Secure Shellfish on my iPhone and I can vibe code from anywhere.
- 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
Way way back when, I also did it to learn a bit more about daily *nix craft.
Also have my resume and other such projects on the server
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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/
Runs IRC bouncer, some scraping jobs, samba server for the family (mostly music and films), backs up our IMAP boxes (on iCloud and other providers).
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...
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.
- 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.
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.
(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!
Thanks for the interest :)
The site is https://www.mycoscopy.uk/
- vpn exit node
- personal email server
Also, over there, i run my monitoring stack (prometheus+grafana etc) since it's the most stable part of my infra in terms of networking and power supply).
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 installed Plex but ended up not using it, so I removed it.
* https://www.langturbo.com
Still great value though, have my app's website and associated infra on one of those 4CPU/24GB in "pay-as-you-go" mode and never ever reached the paying threshold.
[0] https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...
- 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)
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.
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.
[edit] I listen to a bunch of audiobooks, so Audiobookshelf.org
Disclaimer: Creator
All of those are in different containers running through podman.
I run a private Matrix server using conduit. It has about ten active users.
I self-host plenty at home, but most are things that are mainly needed at home like Jellyfin, however that's available to others via the NAT/firewall/Traefik, but other things stay inside the FW since I don't need to access them from the outside.
I 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
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.
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/
So I have a VPS running for thoses downloads and any that slow.
I hope to do more, AI coding allowed me to do a lot of stuff I had been putting off for lack of energy.
Pretty low maintenance overall - I can go months without even thinking about it.
(Netflix caps you at 720p to prevent you pirating it)
https://www.gethisword.com
https://www.givethemlife.com
I'm also using BunnyCDN right now.
https://almeidapaulopt.github.io/tsdproxy/
Recently I moved everything to nixos with the help of Claude, It did everything.
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.
Caveat: almost all of them only listen on a Tailscale network interface, so they are not directly exposed to the Internet.
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
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.
https://github.com/pkulak/barnaby-home
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.
I also have another one of a similar price coloated in Luxembourg, for reasons which are legal in Luxembourg.
Owning your email is nice, and save you sone bucks if you want family accounts.
Host bitwarden and gitea which are useful too.
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.
- 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
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.
Their backend is just a json file, which I GET and PUT with Nginx + WebDav + Basic Auth
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.
Handy to have a non commercial VPN solution you can deploy in any region.
- 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.
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... )
Keeping my namecheap API key on the server means every time I make a new website I just buy the domain and tell my AI agent to SSH in and set everything up.
DNS servers
[EDIT]: wireguard node for my private VPN
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).
Right now one of them hosts the following:
* Jellyfin for my physical disc collection
* Ergo for an IRC server daemon
* A vibe-coded project that lets folks upload images and stick them to a canvas like stickers on a light pole (great for memes)
* Caddy as a reverse proxy
* Pocket-ID for passkey-auth
* LLDAP for crustier directory auth (like Jellyfin)
* FreshRSS for an RSS aggregator
* RSS-Bridge as a support
…and a smattering of in-progress projects. Honestly lamenting not grabbing a $5 Hetzner VPC when they were available so my public services could live out there, but I’m an edge case.
My advice is less to think about justifying it now, and more thinking “would I get $60/yr worth of enjoyment or utility from a VM in a real datacenter somewhere?” In that context, you’ll almost certainly get utility from that by year’s end - and if not, you’re only out the $60.
my workloads are suited to serverless platforms like Cloudflare.
It's just a gtd inbox and consumes nothing, but I can just empty my mind and save my adhd brain from drifting to all those butteflies.
2. Rendezvous server ("supernode")
Local classifier models that run and train on CPU, GitHub: https://github.com/nicobrenner/jeffy
Just spending thinking juice on whether you should spend 5$/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.
The price was low enough that I left it running.
I use mine as basically an open test server I can play with
(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.
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.
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 :-)