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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!

Beelink mini PC, I think S12 with N100 and 16 GB RAM, purchased before the rampocalypse...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightscout

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.

To give you a start: https://www.pikapods.com/apps/

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.

[0] https://github.com/jamespfennell/hoard [1] https://log-demo.unionpots.nyc/

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.

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 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.

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).

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.

Right now running a small home server for https://playground.jeffyclassify.com/

Local classifier models that run and train on CPU, GitHub: https://github.com/nicobrenner/jeffy

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Personal website with a public git repository. Maintenance costs in time, not much though.

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 :)

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.

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.

- 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.

* 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.

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.

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.

why VPS, if you have a computer/laptop collecting dust, onboard to kubehub.io, there you have personal cloud with access to all sorts of apps that already runs on kubernetes.

A 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.

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.

A gnu screen session hosting an irc client so I can stay connected.

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.

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.

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)

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

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.

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

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 train my 20T parameter model on mine.

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)

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.

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.

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

if I wanna experiment on a server this days - use old laptop.

my workloads are suited to serverless platforms like Cloudflare.

i use the oracle x86 1gb ram to host php and static websites.

I run a discord bot for my dota2 guild, works well, deployed as a container

https://spinup.dev

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.

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

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

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

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

Are all these people saying Hermes bots or something?

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

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

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.

A computer professional should have at least 1 vps online 24/7 in the same way a plumber should have a wrench.

Just spending thinking juice on whether you should spend 5$/mo on a server is already a huge issue, just do it and in general increase your investment in proffessional tooling.

I recently started an AT Proto PDS.

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... )

tailscale, onedrive, smb, transmission, torrserver, stremio server

Self hosting nebula

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

finger.farm finger server...

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")

VPN and a virtual machine that downloads torrents. Host your blog on it if you don’t get a lot of visitors.

Hermes and an Orca dev server

reverse proxy

Factorio server

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.

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).

website yes but what about irc bouncer?

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.

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.

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