Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?

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.

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.

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.

[1] https://skybrian-links.exe.xyz/ [2] https://pages.skybrian.com/

I have a website, git, and syncthing relay hosted on a bargain basement VPS. Lowendbox lists some providers for like $1-2/mo.

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.

website yes but what about irc bouncer?

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.

I recently closed down a VPS I had been running for the last 10 years. Mostly used it for hosting a personal website and some smaller other static sites, as well as git repo backups.

After getting into home assistant and setting up a proper home server I no longer saw a need to keep the VPS running. With cloudflare reverse proxy I can still host personal websites, but from inside my home network. Since getting the home server I'm discovering a lot of neat self hosted options and use it a lot more than I ever did the VPS. If nothing else, hosting your own stuff provides a great place to learn and explore. It doesn't have to be always on/on the internet for that to be true though.

I 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).

I recently started an AT Proto PDS.

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.

* Mirror my Github repos (in case GH goes down or closes my account) * Serve my small website (just HTML files using Nginx) * Monitor other applications (and hits a URL when they fail) * Occasionally use it as a WeTransfer alternative (just uploading files into the WWW directory with an obscure name)

Jitsi meet instance running on cheap VPS saves me tons of headaches. My country is adopting censorship/monitoring/firewall restrictions akin to China and Iran. Half of services work with VPN for other half you have to disable it.

Jitsi instance is working all the time and ready to connect 24/7.

On no so mini pc, plex, backups, mini apps that I build for my self, GitHub runners, homeassistant... Google photos bot yet, I am worry about Who Will manage It if I die and my family would lost all the pictures, maybe if someday one of my kids get interested in IT...

Recently I moved everything to nixos with the help of Claude, It did everything.

I 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.

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.

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.

A Reticulum Network Stack transport node that's geographically strategic. I liked the idea behind it.

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.

* https://www.langturbo.com

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 [email protected] starts getting emails from russia.

Dev guy here, so tailscale + Antigravity (+ GitHub). I use it to vibecode from my smartphone

Transmission, Tailscale, Glance Homepage and NginxProxy which points to my local PC and the rest of the services running there.

Here are a few things I do: Host static content behind nginx Run filestash as a partial GoogleDrive replacement (I use it for sharing files with other people, like deliverables), files place on an S3 compatible object store. Run vaultwarder for myself and some family members. Run a container registry service backed by an s3 compatible object store. Run a django web application I wrote for my own use. However, it stores to postgresql running in a different VPS. Run caddy for ssl termination and reverse proxying the other services running here. Redis (I forget if that was for filestash or the container registry, but can be configured to be very light weight).

All of those are in different containers running through podman.

I 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Deploy a vpn

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.

Seedbox. With 5TB storage attached. Glory to Hetzner.

finger.farm finger server...

openresty with several half-done micro-saas, written in golang with sqlite3 storage.

( my post-factum inspiration: https://stevehanov.ca/blog/how-i-run-multiple-10k-mrr-compan... )

Exit node for friends in countries with internet censorship. Specific use case, but it is mine.

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.

Right this minute I've got wireguard and caddy up.

1. Authoritative DNS server

2. Rendezvous server ("supernode")

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).

Hermes and an Orca dev server

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.

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.

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.

Factorio server

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