Rendered at 02:39:12 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
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.
jotato 1 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
satvikpendem 42 minutes ago [-]
Problem is the resolution. I don't want to experience paid 480p in a world of free 4k.
Arainach 15 minutes 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.
ehe78qhe 1 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.
6 hours ago [-]
ozozozd 2 hours ago [-]
Thrift stores? Really?
AndrewKemendo 2 hours ago [-]
Yes there’s usually a good cache for very cheap though most are scratched up
mewse-hn 2 hours ago [-]
psst, they're talking about movies
sreekanth67 26 minutes ago [-]
is this an internet secret code I am missing ?
wyre 4 minutes ago [-]
The two things that torrents are best at are downloading Linux ISOs and pirating content. So using qbittorrent to download Linux ISOs is usually code for piracy, since torrenting Linux ISOs is legal and piracy is not :)
stackghost 5 minutes ago [-]
Many Linux ISOs are distributed via torrents.
Ask yourself what other types of media can be had on popular torrent sites.
jawns 3 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 3 hours ago [-]
"Linux ISOs" is just anything pirated in general.
procinct 2 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 2 hours ago [-]
All my Linux ISOs are actually FreeBSD.
mrtree 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
2 hours ago [-]
jedberg 4 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 :) ).
ehe78qhe 2 minutes 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.
Footprint0521 3 hours ago [-]
What happened?? As someone who is currently doing this without backups…
SmashDan 3 hours ago [-]
HDD failure probably
tlavoie 3 hours ago [-]
Or a house fire, or flood...
small_model 2 hours ago [-]
So not a $5 VPS
ehe78qhe 1 minutes ago [-]
read the OP, they mentioned home servers too
patrickdavey 4 hours ago [-]
How are you sharing tailscale with your family and friends? do you run the server yourself?
xgulfie 1 hours ago [-]
Tailscale is free for home use and lets you invite people to your network by email
j4kp07 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
7bit 1 days ago [-]
How many Linux ISOs are stored on your $5 VPS? One?
ehe78qhe 1 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 6 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 4 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 3 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised you save much space since ISOs are usually stored in already compressed formats
ehe78qhe 41 seconds ago [-]
Weirdly, my "Linux ISOs" are compressed in x265 :)
bethekidyouwant 2 hours ago [-]
No he means a full length Linux ISO can be as small as 700 MB, I personally prefer 1.4 GB
2 hours ago [-]
paulcole 1 days ago [-]
I mean just say you’re pirating…
ehe78qhe 1 days ago [-]
Whaaaaaat? That's illegal! I'm just an OS enthusiast!
Leptonmaniac 6 hours ago [-]
We all enjoy a bit of sailing on the OS (Open Sea)
satvikpendem 41 minutes ago [-]
Especially using Sailfish OS
doobiedowner 5 hours ago [-]
Boomers like to prove they can still have fun
leptons 2 hours ago [-]
As a gen-x'er, it's my birthright
pkulak 6 minutes ago [-]
Set up a family chat, with a built-in helper agent?
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 9 minutes 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
dfish 11 minutes ago [-]
I went a bit over the top and hired a fully remote dev environment in hetzner. I connect to it using rayfish.xyz and I dont have to carry a big-ass laptop like I used to. I just have Mac Air. The whole setup is Mac Studio at home for heavy stuff, Mac Air to travel and hetzner machine 300 usd a month for heavy devving.
viceconsole 1 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 2 minutes ago [-]
What's your strategy for juggling all of these on only 16GB? Docker?
throwaway81523 3 hours ago [-]
By my standards (lowendspirit.com) $5/month is kind of high end for a VPS. I have a small personal web site on a $4 per year VPS. Other than that I have another VPS (I think around $7/m with 500GB of HDD) that I use as a personal storage server and git repo since its internet connection is much faster than my home one, etc. For a while I ran some monitoring tasks on VPSes, though I don't have any active right now.
tierhive.com has super cheap VPS, as low as 10 cents/month for a tiny one (128MB ram, 1GB SSD). ipv6 only, with a NAT proxy for ipv4 I think. It's quite possible to run a useful basic Debian server on that. I ran one with 32MB ram for a while.
Velocifyer 2 hours ago [-]
Where do you get it ($4/Year VPS, presumably with IPv4 as it is used for a website) from?
throwaway81523 2 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 2 hours ago [-]
Does that support HTTP/3 with TLS over QUIC (instead of TCP)
throwaway81523 2 hours ago [-]
I don't know. Maybe I'll look into it sometime. I think I'd just use v6, or NAT with http/2. If you really need v4 you can still do it pretty cheap. Look on lowendspirit.com.
2 hours ago [-]
coolThingsFirst 2 hours ago [-]
Nuts i thought Hetzner had the cheapest options.
oefrha 53 minutes ago [-]
Go to LowEndTalk and Hezner will feel like the priciest option. You’ll need a good tolerance for shadiness though.
Loocid 38 minutes ago [-]
Having never been on LowEndTalk, what do you mean by shadiness?
oefrha 26 minutes ago [-]
It’s a forum for low end providers. You’re dealing with largely unheard of providers often with seemingly impossibly low prices, so you have to wonder if quoted specs are real (yeah before anyone tells me, the “reputable” flat rate providers are also oversubscribed), whether they’ll disappear on moment’s notice or without notice, whether you can trust your data with them, etc.
throwaway81523 21 minutes 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.
agnishom 41 minutes 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 37 minutes 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?
AnotherGoodName 29 minutes 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).
bawolff 7 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.
keithnz 3 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 2 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 2 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 1 hours ago [-]
Sure there are plenty of options out there, but its kind of nice to just have my own thing.
As far as scaling, it's apache serving static html. Even on a $5 vps it would be incredibly difficult to saturate that.
Also sometimes i just want a host to try things on and experiment with.
kaydub 3 hours ago [-]
Pre-llm I'd say it can be more undertaking than most people care to take to move to "serverless" or "cloud native" tech. But now it's probably worth taking a crack at it.
I don't miss sshing into servers or using puppet, ansible, salt, chef.
zem 59 minutes ago [-]
honestly I would rather not have a personal website than be beholden to some big company to host it and have to worry about what random crap they would pull via some flaky automated ToS enforcement.
WD-42 3 hours ago [-]
You just listed off 3 different services, probably involves even more than that.
Bro has a single server and ssh.
keithnz 2 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
bawolff 1 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 2 hours ago [-]
lol GitHub is down all the time.
ro_bit 36 minutes 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 3 minutes 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.
jbarberu 2 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.
ExtremisAndy 60 minutes 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!
droidjj 2 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.
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 1 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.
returningfory2 2 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.
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 3 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.
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 1 hours ago [-]
$10/mo buys 7 vCPU Cores and 8gb ram which is not bad at all.
opengrass 57 minutes ago [-]
Docker services with TSDProxy. No Tailscale container needed per service, one proxy handles everything.
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).
skybrian 5 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.
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.
monk_grilla 3 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.
throwawayk7h 3 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.
Numerlor 3 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 2 hours ago [-]
Cloudflare tunnels work pretty well for this, tho. That with vlan or diff lan and it’s mostly fine.
robwayne 2 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.
kaydub 3 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 $5/mo cheap vps to a basic ec2 instance in pricing. And there were always issues with the cheap vps. Not to mention how easy it is to backup mediawiki + mysql in AWS vs having to spin up ANOTHER vps. Maybe there are cheap vps providers that offer object storage now, but I never bothered looking.
gediz 4 hours ago [-]
I have a 8€ storage VPS from Alpha VPS. It's far from a beefy machine. Hosting it for a few years so far. It has a blog generated with Hugo, WireGuard Easy VPN for me and my friends, Forgejo for a few small repos, SFTPGo for files. Even VPN hosting itself saves me and my friend maybe around 50$ a month. Maintenance is easy, and even easier after AI. Definitely worth it.
SmashDan 3 hours ago [-]
$50 a month for vpn?!
0x262d 6 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.
bradly 2 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.
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.
mycofunguy 3 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 2 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 29 minutes 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!
grugdev42 2 days ago [-]
* Mirror my Github repos (in case GH goes down or closes my account)
* Serve my small website (just HTML files using Nginx)
* Monitor other applications (and hits a URL when they fail)
* Occasionally use it as a WeTransfer alternative (just uploading files into the WWW directory with an obscure name)
mindwork 12 hours ago [-]
Jitsi meet instance running on cheap VPS saves me tons of headaches. My country is adopting censorship/monitoring/firewall restrictions akin to China and Iran. Half of services work with VPN for other half you have to disable it.
Jitsi instance is working all the time and ready to connect 24/7.
mtlynch 3 hours ago [-]
I wanted to do this but I found it hard to secure it in a way that anyone can join meeting links I send but I'm the only one who can create meetings. It seems like Jitsi intentionally makes this hard so that you buy their hosted plan instead. Have you found a good solution?
spl757 2 days ago [-]
dns and email server. i just make aliases that point to a single imap account that is unique for everything i sign up for. if i start to get spam, turn off the alias. it also lets me see who is selling my info or has been hacked when bestbuy@example.com starts getting emails from russia.
Sha1rholder 1 days ago [-]
Deploy email server on a vps is super risky and troublesome
Lammy 4 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 3 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 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 1 days ago [-]
It can vary, I did it for a few years with no issues or deliverability problems
7bit 1 days ago [-]
Lol no and no
qup 16 hours ago [-]
I've been doing this for over a decade, and I've never had one turn to spam yet.
I do think about it sometimes when databases leak, though.
rerdavies 6 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.
ThatPlayer 2 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.
hirako2000 4 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.
anticorporate 2 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 2 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure you could accomplish this with a free DDNS, like DuckDNS.
meken 2 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 :)
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.
johnisgood 1 hours ago [-]
Personal website with a public git repository. Maintenance costs in time, not much though.
justsomehuman 3 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 2 hours ago [-]
This is a good list of things
zhivota 4 hours ago [-]
A few telegram bots that handle my daily schedule and workout planning, my personal website, a personal AnkiWeb server, a language learning tool that aggregates data between LingQ and Anki, a syncthing server, might be forgetting something.
I hope to do more, AI coding allowed me to do a lot of stuff I had been putting off for lack of energy.
mrinterweb 4 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 2 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 run a language learning app* on a single VPS, for free.
I'm not sure if you can still get it, but Oracle used to offer very generous VPS for free. I have a 4 CPUs, 24 GB memory VPS that I'm using for several things, including running the backend and the marketing site for that app.
I installed Plex but ended up not using it, so I removed it.
I run 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.
davekubehub 3 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.
Venn1 3 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.
1 days ago [-]
axus 4 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.
fak3r 8 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.
3 hours ago [-]
rpdillon 6 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.
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.
ultrahax 2 hours ago [-]
A gnu screen session hosting an irc client so I can stay connected.
masfuerte 4 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 3 hours ago [-]
LowEndBox often lists similar VPSes if anyone here is interested
kaydub 3 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
ceritium 6 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.
denkmoon 4 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.
efortis 3 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
nekusar 35 minutes 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.
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.
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.
MisterMunchkin 4 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)
VariousPrograms 4 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.
runjake 1 days ago [-]
My own vibe-coded replacements for services that I formerly paid a subscription for, for services that need the best latency or uptimes. Also, I have a couple physical Linux boxes with other services running for stuff less latency sensitive or that require much more RAM and storage.
Caveat: almost all of them only listen on a Tailscale network interface, so they are not directly exposed to the Internet.
neverminder 2 days ago [-]
Seedbox. With 5TB storage attached. Glory to Hetzner.
01arjuna 1 days ago [-]
Don't ever give it up, it won't be $5 anymore.
small_model 2 hours ago [-]
I train my 20T parameter model on mine.
ikidd 2 hours ago [-]
It'll be done around the time of the heat death of the universe.
keithnz 3 hours ago [-]
I run a discord bot for my dota2 guild, works well, deployed as a container
jotato 1 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
dzonga 2 hours ago [-]
if I wanna experiment on a server this days - use old laptop.
my workloads are suited to serverless platforms like Cloudflare.
chapz 6 hours ago [-]
Transmission, Tailscale, Glance Homepage and NginxProxy which points to my local PC and the rest of the services running there.
DeluluDon 5 hours ago [-]
A Reticulum Network Stack transport node that's geographically strategic. I liked the idea behind it.
sourcecodeplz 2 hours ago [-]
i use the oracle x86 1gb ram to host php and static websites.
mceleri 5 hours ago [-]
Dev guy here, so tailscale + Antigravity (+ GitHub).
I use it to vibecode from my smartphone
Are all these people saying Hermes bots or something?
ogou 2 days ago [-]
Messaging queues and brokers. RabbitMQ, BullMQ, etc. Simple services, but I've learned to keep them on their own images so they recover fast and don't compete with other resources.
dare944 2 days ago [-]
Mail / IMAP server for my family domain. Small web server with a few static content sites. Trillium notes server.
Pretty low maintenance overall - I can go months without even thinking about it.
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.
Sha1rholder 2 days ago [-]
Deploy a vpn
spcebar 1 days ago [-]
Fun little single serve websites and side projects. Built a little graffiti wall a few years back which runs on my VPS and requires basically no attention.
slipwalker 1 days ago [-]
openresty with several half-done micro-saas, written in golang with sqlite3 storage.
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.
curious_cat_163 4 hours ago [-]
I recently started an AT Proto PDS.
AndrewKemendo 2 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
andOlga 1 days ago [-]
Exit node for friends in countries with internet censorship. Specific use case, but it is mine.
hackernud3s 2 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.
solnyshok 4 hours ago [-]
tailscale, onedrive, smb, transmission, torrserver, stremio server
sigbottle 4 hours ago [-]
Self hosting nebula
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.
runnr_az 6 hours ago [-]
finger.farm finger server...
Kim_Bruning 2 days ago [-]
Right this minute I've got wireguard and caddy up.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2 days ago [-]
1. Authoritative DNS server
2. Rendezvous server ("supernode")
dyauspitr 4 hours ago [-]
VPN and a virtual machine that downloads torrents. Host your blog on it if you don’t get a lot of visitors.
browningstreet 2 days ago [-]
Hermes and an Orca dev server
fragmede 1 days ago [-]
Factorio server
robotnikman 3 hours ago [-]
reverse proxy
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.
bigstrat2003 7 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).
calvinmorrison 4 hours ago [-]
website yes but what about irc bouncer?
gspr 22 minutes 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.
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.
justsomehnguy 6 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.
- 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 don't think 2 hours of professionally produced content is worth $10, well that's why AI isn't the only thing destroying art and culture.
Ask yourself what other types of media can be had on popular torrent sites.
It is generous of you to share your "Linux ISOs" with your family and friends.
I used to do this, until I learned the value of offsite backups.
Learn from my mistake (if you aren't already :) ).
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.
https://github.com/pkulak/barnaby-home
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.
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.
Things I like to host: Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, Karakeep, Deluge, Tailscale (for exit nodes, among other things)
Other stuff I want to host but not yet: Immich, Vaultwarden, Hister, Archibebox, CopyParty
I don't understand why you would need Tailscale, for example -- shouldn't your VPS have a static address to which you can reach out from your home and also connect remotely, making Tailscale superfluous?
I setup an old router on the home side so switching on the vpn is just changing the wifi.
The reason to use a $3 vps rather than a dedicated vpn: the dedicated vpn services get blocked since geoblocking knows the big vpn providers, they don’t always have a config for your routers supported vpn types which ai can setup for you in seconds, the dedicated server can do a ton more for you when you need it too (eg. All the other stuff listed here).
I dont know how much value there is to that, but i like having an apache server just running on the internet with a page on it. After all it is only $5
Its also useful in a pinch if i have to transfer files somewhere. upload with scp then download with http is easy, and i dont have to worry about third party services or anything.
As far as scaling, it's apache serving static html. Even on a $5 vps it would be incredibly difficult to saturate that.
Also sometimes i just want a host to try things on and experiment with.
I don't miss sshing into servers or using puppet, ansible, salt, chef.
Bro has a single server and ssh.
Meanwhile, i have been apt-get install'ing apache since i was a teenager, and it still all works the same.
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.
After getting into home assistant and setting up a proper home server I no longer saw a need to keep the VPS running. With cloudflare reverse proxy I can still host personal websites, but from inside my home network. Since getting the home server I'm discovering a lot of neat self hosted options and use it a lot more than I ever did the VPS. If nothing else, hosting your own stuff provides a great place to learn and explore. It doesn't have to be always on/on the internet for that to be true though.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightscout
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/
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!
That, plus tailscale and Secure Shellfish on my iPhone and I can vibe code from anywhere.
https://almeidapaulopt.github.io/tsdproxy/
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).
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've been really happy after upgrading my home server from a Pi to a Beelink Mini a couple of years ago. Pays itself off pretty quickly once you factor in your subscription savings and you own the hardware, have very fast local streaming on your LAN and avoid having to trust yet another third party.
I do put most things on my home box (certainly can't put my media server data on $5 VPS!), but stuff like my XMPP server, websites, etc. that I want available even when my power or Internet goes out live on a VPS.
I run a bunch of cheap (free?) custom apps for myself in the "serverless" or "cloud native" stuff in AWS. Everything else is on my NAS running on my home network (I see people mentioning qbittorrent, jellyfin, etc).
I stopped using cheap vps providers probably a decade ago, not a huge difference between a $5/mo cheap vps to a basic ec2 instance in pricing. And there were always issues with the cheap vps. Not to mention how easy it is to backup mediawiki + mysql in AWS vs having to spin up ANOTHER vps. Maybe there are cheap vps providers that offer object storage now, but I never bothered looking.
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.
(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!
Jitsi instance is working all the time and ready to connect 24/7.
It depends on your use case, and ability to actually administrate it properly.
I do think about it sometimes when databases leak, though.
To be honest, I did use it as a sacrificial email account for a while, used to sign up for websites that weren't completely trustworthy back in the day.
Host bitwarden and gitea which are useful too.
Costs a bit more than 5 bucks with a tb drive. But worth it to be always on and these consume little resources. All in one box.
My primary use case is to be able to use [dumbthingiwanttoshare].mydomain.tld without having to touch DNS records. The VPS has a static IP; I often don't.
Actual Budget - https://github.com/actualbudget/actual
AirTrail - https://github.com/johanohly/AirTrail
Beszel - https://github.com/henrygd/beszel
Coder - https://github.com/coder/coder
Crowdsec - https://github.com/crowdsecurity/crowdsec
Dawarich - https://github.com/Freika/dawarich
Dozzle - https://github.com/amir20/dozzle
Forgejo - https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo
Forgejo runner - https://code.forgejo.org/forgejo/runner
Grafana - https://github.com/grafana/grafana
Immich - https://github.com/immich-app/immich
Karakeeo - https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep
KitchenOwl - https://github.com/tombursch/kitchen owl
Loki - https://github.com/grafana/loki
Matrix - Tuwunel (https://github.com/matrix-construct/tuwunel) and cinny (https://github.com/cinnyapp/cinny)
memos - https://github.com/usememos/memos
Nourish - https://github.com/norish-recipes/norish
ntfy - https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy
oauth2-proxy - https://github.com/oauth2-proxy/oauth2-proxy
Outline - https://github.com/outline/outline
Paperless-ngx - https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx
Pingvin Share- https://github.com/stonith404/pingvin-share
Pixelfed - https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed
Pocket ID - https://github.com/pocket-id/pocket-id
Reitti - https://github.com/dedicatedcode/reitti
Signal CLI rest API - https://github.com/bbernhard/signal-cli-rest-api
Slink - https://github.com/andrii-kryvoviaz/slink
Ghost - personal music blog
Traefik - https://github.com/traefik/traefik
Umami - https://github.com/umami-software/umami
Uptime Kuma - https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma
Vikunja - https://github.com/go-vikunja/vikunja
wg-easy - https://github.com/wg-easy/wg-easy
ZeroByte - https://github.com/nicotsx/zerobyte
I used to run a couple of Hugo blogs but I've ended up moving them to bunny.
I hope to do more, AI coding allowed me to do a lot of stuff I had been putting off for lack of energy.
Racknerd looked to be the preferred option after Hetzner raised their prices based on reading some of the forums/reddit.
I ended up going with "Server Host" based on ram and price. 4gb ram, 28 dollars for the year, and renews annually for that price (no discount expiring games). They initially provisioned it in the wrong region, I sent a support ticket in, and they fixed it same day. So far, so good.
I found it on lowendbox. It took me a minute to get past the gimmicky stuff. https://lowendbox.com/blog/serverhost-halloween-2026/
https://www.racknerd.com/specials/
I installed Plex but ended up not using it, so I removed it.
* https://www.langturbo.com
I also have another one of a similar price coloated in Luxembourg, for reasons which are legal in Luxembourg.
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 self-host plenty at home, but most are things that are mainly needed at home like Jellyfin, however that's available to others via the NAT/firewall/Traefik, but other things stay inside the FW since I don't need to access them from the outside.
Having a WebDAV enabled a server that can generate thumbnails for photos, allow browsing through them, serve as an audio and video player, and also acts as a markdown and note-taking server has been immensely valuable. I write several apps that can write themselves back to the server over WebDAV sort of like tiddlywiki, so the overall combination has been extremely useful.
All of those are in different containers running through podman.
I run a private Matrix server using conduit. It has about ten active users.
Recently I moved everything to nixos with the help of Claude, It did everything.
Xray proxy so my BYO phone can get to the internet through work's BYO wifi.
HTTPS so I can share screenshots, images and files without relying on some other schmuck's computer.
Their backend is just a json file, which I GET and PUT with Nginx + WebDav + Basic Auth
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.
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.
Local classifier models that run and train on CPU, GitHub: https://github.com/nicobrenner/jeffy
(Netflix caps you at 720p to prevent you pirating it)
Caveat: almost all of them only listen on a Tailscale network interface, so they are not directly exposed to the Internet.
- Jellyfin
- Audiobook shelf
- Immich
- ChangeDetection (for monitoring when something is back in stock)
- Minecraft server for my kids
- Several apps I have for my own use
- HomeAssistant
- Hermes
my workloads are suited to serverless platforms like Cloudflare.
Pretty low maintenance overall - I can go months without even thinking about it.
( my post-factum inspiration: https://stevehanov.ca/blog/how-i-run-multiple-10k-mrr-compan... )
Just spending thinking juice on whether you should spend 5$/mo on a server is already a huge issue, just do it and in general increase your investment in proffessional tooling.
I use mine as basically an open test server I can play with
Handy to have a non commercial VPN solution you can deploy in any region.
2. Rendezvous server ("supernode")
The price was low enough that I left it running.
(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.
Proxmox VE with various guests (PeaNUT, Gitea, Ntfy, n8n, AI inference, agents) running across 3 servers (total >300GB RAM, 6TB SSD storage), with a separate Proxmox Backup server.
I can't qualify for the $5 here, but:
I have a bunch of them what faciliate the needs to access the network resources what block my $default connection.
I'm running my own NS on them and this is always a question if does really worth it - but it works for me, including hosting a dozen of domains and not being depended on any 3rd party, including the bills and their web interfaces, along with tge security shenanigans[0].
There is Forgejo, Syncthing relay, Syncthing client and a file server for the most important things.
Formerly there was a NextCloud instance as a gateway to access the before mentioned fileserver.
Zabbix server never made it to a rented monitoring service but it is still warns me about the problems way before even the $job one does.
Oh, I'm running docker-mailserver which backups my mail from a couple accounts I do have.
[0] I do have and had services what locked out me of my accounts for my security. It's quite a sad experience.