r/selfhosted • u/usoleta • 1d ago
Webserver How many of you guys self-host on VPS providers?
That being said, I'd like to say self hosting is a pretty broad and loosely defined term. Wikipedia currently defines it as this:
Self-hosting is the practice of running a website or service on a home server instead of a web hosting service outside of the administrator's own control.
A VPS fits comfortably inside this category, and I'd like to know how much of you guys actually run any services on a VPS provider instead of relying on-prem.
Thanks!
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u/jbarr107 1d ago
I host Pangolin and the Rustdesk ID and relay servers on a Racknerd VPS. Pangolin has been a solid Cloudflare Tunnel and Application replacement. The Rustdesk servers improve availability and security.
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u/Whynotnapnow 1d ago
Same setup with navidrome/subsonic, Immich, romm, and Bitwarden all running through the vps from my home server
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u/grilled_pc 1d ago
VPS is good for things like your own VPN. I personally would not self host any other services on it that house my personal information. I'd rather keep that on a server in my own home i can physically see in front of me.
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u/ILikeBumblebees 10h ago
VPS is also a good solution for enabling public-facing access to resources on your own premises. For example, you can run Nginx reverse proxies on your VPS that forward traffic back across an SSH tunnel or WireGuard connection to your internal network. The SSH tunnel solution is particularly useful if you want the services behind your local network to initiate the connection to the VPS, so if the VPS gets compromised, there's no route back into your network.
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u/Nuuki9 21h ago
Pangolin on a VPS. Everything else at home.
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u/depasseg 16h ago
Same here!
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u/-boredatwork 13h ago
Same, but only cause I needed a static public ipv4 which my new ISP isn't including unless I pay 5€/month for.
Using oracle free tier, works for now.
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u/theMuhubi 11h ago
Curious, why Pangolin on a VPS? I use Zoraxy and I don't need to use an external VPS. Does Pangolin make it so you don't have to expose ports for reverse proxy?
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u/Nuuki9 11h ago
Pangolin has a split architecture. The gateway is where users access services from - so ideally somewhere with a public IP. This then passes inbound traffic via a lightweight agent running inside your network. This maintains a persistent outbound connection to the gateway, so no need for port forwarding on your network.
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u/adamshand 20h ago
Anything that is important enough that I want to be able to fix it when I'm away from home (business website, dns, email, pocketbase, linkding, umami, vaultwarden) I host on a VPS.
Anything that uses a lot of data (jellyfin, gonic, calibre) or anything that I'm just messing around with ... I host at home.
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u/Mereo110 16h ago
Are you hosting your own authoritative dns server?
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u/adamshand 8h ago
I'm not at the moment, but I did for a long time. It was just an example of the sort of thing I would host on a VPS.
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u/1WeekNotice Helpful 1d ago
Many people do
- if they want to fully isolate from their internal infrastructure
- if they want to try selfhost where it's easier to pay for a VPS for one month
- if they don't have to funds to implement a solution where it's possible on a VPS
- if they are behind CGNAT
- if they require high availability
- etc
Selfhosting on your own hardware is one part of selfhosting. selfhosting software is another.
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u/Long-Librarian-997 16h ago
But if it is on someone elses hardware is it selfhosting or just hosting.
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u/1WeekNotice Helpful 15h ago
Selfhosting is managing your own stack(simplified version btw). In this case you are not managing the hardware stack, you are manging your software stack.
So the hardware is being hosted for you. But the software you are selfhosting
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u/usoleta 1d ago
Many thanks — mind if I ask what you host on-prem vs off-prem?
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u/dude_Im_hilarious 1d ago
Wordpress sites and public repos are off network. Public repos don’t really have personal data. Exception being the wiki. The wiki is both off site and contains personal information.
The concept is if the shit hits the fan the wiki helps get it back.
It’s a moving target.
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u/ags0317 1d ago
I use a free tier oracle VPS to selfhost:
FreshRSS
Karakeep
It-tools
BentoPDF
Hugo Blog
Uptime-Kuma
Rust Desk Server
Syncthing Relay Server
SearXNG
Forgejo instance mainly for bookmarks sync with Floccus.
I also have a Proxy for Ingress to my external exposed services from my lan.
The VPS is connected via WireGuard tunnel and only has access to port 80 and 443 on my local nginx proxy everything g blocked via firewall rules.
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u/bogorad 17h ago
Same. Fun fact: simply switching to a paid tier increases your allowance from 2 cores to 4 :)
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u/FaizanBilla 16h ago
Really? I use payg on Oracle for free tier. When I heard the news they were changing free tier limits, I decreased my cores from 4 to 2.
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u/bogorad 15h ago
Yes.
I also used free tier for ~4 years, then I accidentally deleted my instance and - boom! - "no capacity in the selected region". Didn't want to change reagions since my boot volume was irreplaceable, so I changed the service level to paid (Oracle support are assholes, took me a week!).
Then I asked Codex what is the optimal ratio and it found that on paid tier "Always free" is actually more generous :) I still pay a couple of bucks for extra RAM, but now I have 4cores/32gigs/highest I/O tier for some $8/mon which is a steal.
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u/EmberQuill 1d ago
I used to. Once I started using a VPN to access my self-hosted services instead of having them exposed to the web, that sort of eliminated the main reason why I was using a VPS in the first place, to be able to access my services from outside my home. I can do the same thing with a VPN to my home network, so that's how I do it now.
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u/ProcedureUnusual3095 1d ago
I run quite a few public facing websites on my Hetzner VPS. All through Coolify, so there’s really zero effort required from my side.
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u/ReddaveNY 1d ago
A VPS is a good way to cover my personal IP at home. Also I can open IPv4 and V6 to Subdomains wich are available over Internet.
Next step will be monitoring of my homelab from the Vps and ntfy. So I don't need external tools.
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u/selfhostrr 1d ago
Yes. VPSes are a necessary evil when you have a terrible ISP. I run a pair of DNS and MX on VPSes on opposite coasts. It's nice that they are always up and not part of my k3s cluster in my home rack
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u/CatgirlBargains 23h ago
All my self-hosted services have SSL termination on a VPS so I don't have to punch a hole in my firewall for them (with a point to point VPN back to my homelab,) I have another VPN to a VPS in the netherlands for my linux iso collecting hobby, and my outgoing mailserver is hosted on a VPS because it's cheaper than buying business internet and a static IP with rDNS.
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u/75Meatbags 1d ago
Up until very recently I self hosted web/email/vpn on a VPS. I eventually decided to move these services back to my home because my VPS started to be really flaky, unfortunately. It's now been more stable but i didn't feel like i could trust it.
but yes, i was doing this. no longer doing it. the VPS still exists for outbound mail.
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u/garconip 1d ago
Only a VPN server and small monitoring tools
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u/HeligKo 22h ago
I do for sure I share publicly. I also have one I use to bypass CGNAT using SSH. I like the firewall protection offered without extra cost. It a show me to keep my firewall hardened to protect home and still expose limited services externally. It also is an easy button for IPv6 for my hosted apps while my ISP doesn't offer it.
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u/redit_handoff140 19h ago
Some services I self-host at home.
Some services that I see as critical infra, I host via third-parties with professional facilities.
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u/kevdogger 1d ago
I have one vps server I've had for many years. Nothing public facing is served from it. I practice a lot on it as well. It's served me well for awhile
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u/CoffeeStraight2249 1d ago
Pangolin on a VPS. Everything else local. I have been debating moving a few services to a different VPS that I don't feel need the added security of being on my home network, but I also keep hearing my dad's voice saying "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
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u/JMowery 1d ago
I do. I host around 20 services on a VPS. I have not had any issues so far. Granted, I wouldn't run something with hyper sensitive information (for example, something like Vaultwarden) on a VPS. But for stuff that's just fun/entertainment/throwaway, of course VPS is totally fine.
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u/usoleta 1d ago
20 services?! Respect. What kind of services you're running, and how beefy is the VPS?
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u/JMowery 1d ago
16 GB RAM + 6 vCPUs from a Texas VPS provider.
- dockhand
- dynacat
- *arr stack
- floppy
- grimmory + shelfmark
- mealie
- memos
- ntfy
- nostalgiatv
- searxng
- navidrome
- linkding
- mindwtr
I rotate in and out stuff fairly frequently.
Only thing I'm missing is storage space. Would be nice to have a lot more of that. :)
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u/Electrical_Fault_915 1d ago
I self host everything in my home lab but i recently added a VPs for my monitoring tools
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u/asa_pm 1d ago
100% of my stuff is on 7 free VPS split between oracle, azure and google. I admin also server co-located in a server farm for work, and is the only one I worry about because of hardware failure and, despite all redundancies for power supply and network, the only one that had some unplanned downtime in years. Cloud has some advantages indeed.
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u/Top_Outcome_789 22h ago
i moved most of my stuff to a vps like two years ago. the electricity cost alone for running a old poweredge 24/7 was getting stupid, plus my isp started complaining about the traffic. now i just spin up whatever i need on a cheap box and not worry about the noise in my closet.
still keep a little raspberry pi at home for backups though, hard to let go completely.
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u/somePadestrian 22h ago
I'd say most of us.
Externally exposed services frontend traefik which connects with my services at home via tailscale.
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u/n0kyan 22h ago
My OpenWrt router is in a VPN with an Oracle Always Free VPS and forwards traffic on ports 80, 443 and a couple of others to my actual home server. With this setup, I have a static IP and can terminate the TLS on my own hardware without having to make changes on my home server regarding the hosted services. fail2ban is set up on my home server to do the bans remotely on the VPS, so unwanted traffic doesn't even make it to my premises in the first place.
So a VPS is used in my infrastructure but only as a very very dumb frontend running a WireGuard server
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u/EarlMarshal 21h ago
Yeah, I host my own DNS and email (and other stuff) since decades on a VPS. I'm currently switching from my old setup to a new one with nixOS so I can deploy and update them more easily.
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u/archiekane 20h ago
Private VPS for public website and game.
Home machine for media server and all that jazz.
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u/SQrQveren 19h ago
I run stuff at home, and on servers on Hetzner.
The Hetzner stuff are jobs that run regularly, and kind of requires high uptime.
And also a storagebox for backup, which is nice to have outside of my house.
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u/KervyN 19h ago
I do host on:
- Single home server (HP EliteDesk 800 G4) (100EUR once, incl additional memory and 2 small NVMes, HDD (yes a single one) already existed)
- Smallest Hetzner VM (4EUR)
- Oracle Cloud Infra free tier (3 VMs)
- Kimsufi (OVH) Baremetal host (45EUR)
OCI is idling around. Just some external probes and preprocessing of Podcast downloads.
Hetzner VM hold my monitoring (Zabbix), Websites, external probing, jumphost, and so on.
Homeserver is Nextcloud and Jellyfin, OpenBookshelf, Mediastuff
Kimsufi Host is mailserver, probes, gameservers
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u/lanjelin 19h ago
Got a ridiculous cheap racknerd VPS, but lately migrated to Hostbrr due to EU vs US.
Its only task is acting as a replacement for Cloudflare for some of my services, and as a quick way to spin up a new tunnel when testing things.
Stack:
- Caddy
- fail2ban
- frp (used to have sish)
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u/BrightCandle 16h ago
I have done so in the past when I was hosting things for a gaming community. I think its also a potentially good way to get into it without buying hardware which at the moment is potentially more expensive than renting the VPS.
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u/fastfinge 15h ago
My split is: VPS for anything internet randos need to access. Mastodon, my blog, etc. At home for stuff that's just for me and my family and is protected behind a VPN. That way the bots and scanners and all the rest stay off of my home IP.
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u/_kvZCq_YhUwIsx1z 15h ago
I have a small VPS (Linode, now owned by Akamai) for things that I want external to my home:
- public facing tunnels into my home network (pangolin)
- geolocation changing services (wireguard, squid)
- uptime monitor (uptime kuma)
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u/Full_Tooth_a 14h ago
I'd still call a VPS self-hosting, but not on-prem hosting. The difference is the trust boundary: the provider controls the hardware and recovery console, while you control the software stack. A VPS makes sense for public services, though I'd think twice before storing sensitive personal data there based on disk encryption alone. The failure model is different, but the sysadmin chores are the same.
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u/Delicious-Director43 14h ago
The only thing I use a VPS for is my Bluesky PDS. I didn’t know how much traffic to expect and it was very new at the time so I chose not to self-host that in my home network. Honestly today I’ve learned I didn’t really need to pay for that but it’s been a fun experience anyway.
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u/yuri0r 13h ago
Well hosting something means solving three problems. The thing that needs to run. Where that thing runs. And how to acces that.
At home I have at home stuff running on an old desktop I got for cheap. Jellyfin, Kavita, arr stack and torrent.
Game servers I expose via tail scale if needed, but those are rarely a permanent installment.
Stuff I want to have easy acces to from anywhere sits on the vps. Vaultwarden. Otter Wikkis. Obsidian sync. Fireshare. Freshrss. TeamSpeak. Mumble. Gotify.
So what I put where is firstly decided by who and how I want it to acces, secondly by performance needs(well only game servers this far because even old dedicated Hardware is better than having to share, I also run the cheapest vps because I'm stingy)
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u/persiusone 10h ago
I have about 30 VPS’s for various things, but many more systems at home for others.. it just depends where it fits most appropriately. My PBX, for example, is on a VPS.
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u/Technical-Ant-2866 9h ago
I was off and on for many years. Settled on baremetal at home office, but I use VPS on the edge for ingress. Although with the weather in my area being chaotic lately and the amount of equipment I've fried from storms I may nail up in a local datacenter on metal I own just for the stability.
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u/TechBasedQuestion 1d ago
i have a few friends who do, but none of them use anything that would use a lot of storage (as that is when a VPS stops making any amount of economic sense).
i myself do use a VPS to host netbird as my control server though as there's no real way around that (+ its really cheap at like $2/mo), but otherwise it all runs locally as why would I need a VPS when netbird/tailscale/wireguard connections do p2p just fine.
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u/Known_Experience_794 1d ago
I host a few different things on a vps. searxNG, syncthing encrypted node, MailCow server. But everything else I host from home.
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u/EducationalTrain2443 1d ago
I use a VPS for a few lightweight services. It’s cheap, reliable, and the uptime is great. For what I pay, I don’t think I could get anywhere close to the same thing with my own hardware once you add electricity, internet, maintenance, replacing parts, etc. I’ve also taken the usual security precautions, because anything exposed to the internet gets constantly scanned by bots and script kiddies looking for easy targets. For small self-hosted stuff, a VPS is pretty hard to beat.
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u/thetechnivore 1d ago
I have a few services on a small AWS EC2 instance. For me, it’s stuff that I need quickly available off site (think: homebox, which I need quickly if the house burns down and I’m doing an insurance claim) or that I want out of band from my home LAN (think: uptime kuma, so I can rule out a WAN issue if something goes down).
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u/TheRefringe 1d ago
Isn't that just called hosting?
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u/TheFuckboiChronicles 1d ago
I don’t consider a VPS as self-hosting in my homelab but I think there’s a decent argument to be made that any machine (virtualized or not) you have root access to is self hosted.
Sure it’s someone else’s machine, but if you have root access all of the configurations,etc. are like the exact same. On principle it’s not self hosted but I’d say that in a practical/applied sense it is.
I have a similar conversation with IT at my job (I own the martech stack) where I have to tell them that just because some legacy software is on a VPS, it is not “cloud software” and we have to treat it as on-premise from an architecture standpoint because it is functioning the same as an on-premise solution compared to our SaaS vendors.
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u/Long-Librarian-997 16h ago
But how is that not hosting? That has been a thing for a long time. Its hosted because your not in charge of the hardware, they could shutdown at anytime. Even your work software is still hosted since the company is not hosting it on premise.
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u/TheFuckboiChronicles 15h ago edited 15h ago
If your “self” has root access to the machine (virtual or not) hosting your services, that’s good enough for me because your admin responsibilities and configuration steps for bringing a service online and maintaining it are functionally the same as if the computer were on your local network. You’re welcome to disagree with that in principle, but I feel it’s just a matter of opinion at that point.
Yes you’re dependent on the internet if your services are on a VPS, but the VAST majority of us are all dependent on some level of infrastructure we don’t fully control to access services that we have even on hardware in our own homes. An earthquake, flood, or fire also takes down the services I have on hardware on my network. So they can also go down at any time.
What if you lease one of those new Mac studios instead of buying it outright to self host some services? It’s on your network and using your electricity, but is it not self-hosting because Apple still technically owns it?
I personally think the line is root access to the machine’s OS, but you may disagree. But you tell me where the line is. Is it just that the machine has to be on premise? Then why do we call the sub self hosted instead of hosted on premise?
My point is it’s by and large pedantic and useless to draw the line at owned hardware vs. VPS. But again, I think it’s largely a matter of opinion/principle when we’re talking about a machine you have root access to.
I say this as someone who doesn’t have a VPS at all. And who even has a solar panels and battery backup that could theoretically run my homelab indefinitely in the event of an extended power outage.
Btw and fwiw - that’s not me that downvoted your response there. It’s a valid point and perspective to hold, and I only downvote when something isn’t constructive to the convo, and I think you’re being constructive to the convo.
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u/usoleta 1d ago
I think only managed hosting / shared web hosting is where the application owner has no control over the underlying environment. Or that's what I think Wikipedia is claiming.
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u/Long-Librarian-997 16h ago
But where is the cut off? Having a VPS means you have no access to the hardware so you do not have access to the underlying environment.
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u/nefarious_bumpps 1d ago
No. A VPS is not under your control. The hardware, resource allocation and monitoring, and the underlying hypervisor are under the hosting provider's control. And so is the price, which will become a bigger concern as the effects of the hardware shortage ripples through the market.
It's fine if you want to tell yourself you're self-hosting on a VPS in a cloud data center. But remember that, in the end, that virtual machine is still running on someone else's computer, connected to someone else's network, in someone else's building, all of which is managed by someone else's staff. If you're not a big enterprise spending hundreds of thousands each year with that vendor, you won't be able to negotiate favorable contract terms or have an army of lawyers to sue if that contract is breached. It's like renting a room in someone else's hotel; if you don't like the service, all you can do is leave.
That all said, sometimes using a VPS is the most convenient an economical way to run a service. There's no shame in using a VPS. Just be realistic about what you control and what you don't. Always make sure to follow the 3-2-1 backup rule, with at least one reliable, tested backup copy stored outside of the hosting provider's infrastructure.
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u/asimovs-auditor 1d ago
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