- 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.

- laptop, phone (termux), Linux VPS, and home inference machine can all see each other on the same Wireguard network via the VPS.

- Todo list web app for our family shopping list. Used daily for many years now.

- Personal daily updating dashboard with important numbers I care about, life metrics, weather, etc.

- Projects priority list which tells me what to do each day based on last update for each project (each project has a desired frequency of work and it prioritises by "lateness"). Checks git activity and RSS feeds to see what I'm neglecting.

- "Note to self" app and voice automation which transcribes and adds to my Joplin notebook on my laptop.

- AI agent on my phone I can long-press power button and give spoken commands ("add milk to the shopping list"). Uses private home inference machine, see below.

- Social media POSSE syndication scripts. Mastodon posts are syndicated to other networks.

- Blog posting pipeline from my Joplin notebook out to the web.

- Home inference machine (mostly solar powered) I use for personal finance, automation, note search, and other sensitive AI tasks.

- Self-hosted calendar and contacts (separate VPS but same idea).

I don't log in to Google at all. With LLMs now it's very little work to build and maintain these things. Absolutely wild time to be a home tinkerer.

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.

I also run a few personal web services: Immich, Gitea, Bookstack, Jellyfin, and more. That cheap VPS couldn't handle it. I run the services on a computer in my home office. Caddy runs on the VPS with one proxy line per service. Data is, of course, exchanged via Yggdrasil. The domains for the various services all map to the VPS’s IP addresses. Caddy then handles the routing correctly. The system works simply. I can even run storage-intensive services like Jellyfin, and it only costs me a few euros for the VPS.

[0] https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/

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.

People have commented a lot already, but one thing I do that I haven't seen others already doing yet is I run a news summarization pipeline with Miniflux and Flatnotes.

All my feeds are in one of two categories; Summarize and NoSummarize. Once a day, a script fires at everything unread in the Summarize category, pulls the full text from Miniflux (or calls a scraping service if it appears to only have an article stub), groups similar articles to together with a 60 to 80 word summary, and for everything not grouped together it gives each article a 20 word or so summary. Just enough for me to know if it warrants a full read or not. Then it takes that a posts the digest to a markdown file in a Flatnotes folder. Flatnotes I expose via Tailscale Funnel so I can read it anywhere, including on my work laptop if I'm at the office.

Why Miniflux and Flatnotes and not other options? Mostly because those two are about as lightweight as it gets with still pleasing interfaces and basic features.

You’re going to get a lot of affirmative answers here, which is maybe what you’re looking for. Maybe you’re brainstorming.

But I’ll affirm what you’ve probably been thinking all along: It’s not worth it. I set up a Lenovo ThinkCentre to be my personal Linux server running on my home network. I could use it for backups, ssh, taskwarrior, etc. It did solve some problems.

It also creates problems. The biggest is that it’s another computer to maintain. It needs updates. Critically, it needs security. You need to secure the ports and services, use vpn, etc.

I found that none of the gains were worth the maintenance. For my problem set, it’s easier to keep multiple cheap laptops in multiple locations and use a flash drive (rather than network) to move data between them.

For backups, specialized cloud services (currently Arq going to B2) does the job better, along with Carbon Copy Cloner to a local volume.

For me, having to maintain and secure it was too much work. A vps may have been easier in some ways, but harder in others.

So in the end you may be right: just run things on your laptop.

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.

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.

It also hosts e-books, primarily so I can load up the website in an ebook reader and download my own books, rather than worry about connecting my reader up via cable and so on.

Also when I'm out, and I find a maybe interesting book, I can check if I have it or (if the price is too high) add it to my wishlist. Similar for relatives who wish to buy me a book. I live in Asia but primarily read in English, so I do have to capitalize on opportunities to buy books when they arise.

It's open-source, I've been running it a few years, you can use it if you like. It runs on a potato, so your 5$ VPS will be able to host several other things at the same time:

https://github.com/seanboyce/ubiblio

I use it mostly to host a Minecraft server and to host a dumb website I vibe coded to share 3D Movie Maker movies. https://showbo.at/

ETA:

Looking at downstream comments, it looks like it's limited to 12 gigs and 2 cores now. Still a pretty good deal for free but not quite as good as it used to be.

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).

Now the city got its act together and appointments are easy to find, but for a while it was very useful. I'm glad to say that this service is ready to be shut down.

https://nicolasbouliane.com/projects/appointment-finder

  * kubernetes for learning and a lot of followup just because it enable easy deployment t9 play around witg things (argocd, openbao, uptime kuma, victoriametrics, cnpg/postgres, cloud beaver, traefik)
  * keycloak for everything that supports it or can be made to support it without patching it
  * personal website (via WordPress)
  * grafana for monitoring my side project
  * foundry to play DSA with friends
  * various small hobby stuff
  * best: paperless ngx

Minipc:

  * proxmox host
  * home assistant
  * open media vault, jelly fin for digital versions of my DVDs because it is easier than using the physical dvds
  * past: opencode/Claude dev VMs
  * Hermes to play CEO for my side project (just as an advisor, he has little actual connectivity)
  * pihole for local dns and adguard
  * Caddy for local tls

Secondary was for bittorent'ing.

- family ai knowledge / data store MCP https://setoku.com/

I love interserver.net which starts at $3/mo and has much better network and cpu than providers with twice the specs. I benchmarked a bunch for a hobby project. I also run some professional stuff there (worker servers for https://hedgy.works). Also LAX locations with great ping in California.

BTW I do think this is a golden age for the humble VPS. If you’re daring you can totally let Claude code be your sysadmin.

I've opened some of the data up to the public: cvrdb.dk for danish companies (working on granting users access to 'full' extracts of certain parts). ratemyaisite.com which is just a tiny subset of a larger project that I've dubbed commoncrawl-explore (cc-explore), which is run on a subdomain of my personal website, but purely for my own sake.

Making your own devex pleasant is the real game changer imho, not the VPS. I've made it easy for myself to deploy new projects using Dokploy (also tried Coolify).

I don't find the maintenance to be a problem - but part of that is not treating hobby projects as something that has to be enterprise-ready :)

For starters, a VPS for each claude code project (with a simple orchestrator and project creator).

I'm also playing lowkey with small ESP32 powered automations, and having a VPS to monitor them, show a web interface and push updates. And I've just added a small REPL like module.

It was previously running on a $25 VPS and we made a number of optimizations/enhancements and it's in a happy place now.

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

I just use a $10/yr VPS with one core, 1 GB RAM, and I forget how much storage. It's more than enough. None of my things need much storage, and if they did I could pull them over Tailscale from home.

Not quite a VPS, but I recently found a box of old single-board computers that were collecting dust: a RasPi Zero W, an MK802+, a DragonBoard, a BeagleBone, and some others. All pretty ancient and I wasn't super motivated to go scrounging for working Linux images. But Codex did a great job of building images for them and getting them running with minimal intervention. So now I have one running with the sole purpose of keeping a persistent tmux session going (with the terminals going to various other endpoints). I'll put the others to work in some similar way, probably.

- irssi running in screen (irc client, yes, occasionally I still talk to people on there)

- my very small imgur-inspired image hosting (https://github.com/deniska/imghost)

- miniflux (RSS client, I am trying to get into a habit of reading RSS feeds instead of letting the algorithm to decide what I read)

- git directory with bare repos I use as remotes over ssh. I also have gitea installed, but I don't really see the appeal if I'm the sole user of a repo.

- snikket, xmpp server with a whatsapp-esque mobile app, useful to talk to people who are behind the great Russian firewall

- llama.cpp serving gemma4-26b-a4b for image processing of things too sensitive to let openai and other similar companies to see it (ok, this on won't fit on a $10 vps)

- minecraft server for this once a year 2-week minecraft phase

I vibecoded a diary + life statistics/metrics web app, another one that shows me public transport I care about, etc.

Half of the fun was setting all of this up. Learning terraform, kubernetes, helm, lgtm observability stack, https, vibecoding…

I can also use this to show that I am a “total stack” A-Z developer.

Jellyfin, Tailscale (to route my Internet when I'm travelling), and 3-4 web app side projects.

While I've considered a VPS for true 24/7 access (and more power), I haven't yet built something critical enough to justify the cost.

Also, Tailscale on a VPS wouldn't serve my travelling needs which are to use my home connection/IP/geo.

I might also have a really stupid website^H^H^H^Hpage "counting" how many hours of daylight we saved. (Hint: It's just a static page with the number 0 on it.)

Right now one of them hosts the following:

* Jellyfin for my physical disc collection

* Ergo for an IRC server daemon

* A vibe-coded project that lets folks upload images and stick them to a canvas like stickers on a light pole (great for memes)

* Caddy as a reverse proxy

* Pocket-ID for passkey-auth

* LLDAP for crustier directory auth (like Jellyfin)

* FreshRSS for an RSS aggregator

* RSS-Bridge as a support

…and a smattering of in-progress projects. Honestly lamenting not grabbing a $5 Hetzner VPC when they were available so my public services could live out there, but I’m an edge case.

My advice is less to think about justifying it now, and more thinking “would I get $60/yr worth of enjoyment or utility from a VM in a real datacenter somewhere?” In that context, you’ll almost certainly get utility from that by year’s end - and if not, you’re only out the $60.

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/

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

It’s definitely a way to get a competitive advantage over others that rely on more traditional architecture.

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.

(OpenBSD)

One for personal self-hosted projects: languagetool, nextcloud, hister, syncthing, restic backups, vaultwarden, windmill.

Another for public facing web apps I host through cloudflare tunnels. As well as public facing friend tools like jellyfin via tailscale tunnels.

Everything on nixos with config repo that configs all of my machines with claude code. Restrict claude from executing `nixos-rebuild switch` and review each change before switching manually.

[0]: https://docs.sailresearch.com/sailboxes

https://github.com/fosrl/pangolin

Have used them for years. I don't use them anymore but that is because I no longer have a requirement.

Pretty low maintenance overall - I can go months without even thinking about it.

It’s simply more cost effective to run your own micro data centre once you have enough workloads. I suppose if you have absolutely no office anywhere and don’t need office Internet, electric, etc. then it’s worth it.

That, plus tailscale and Secure Shellfish on my iPhone and I can vibe code from anywhere.

File sharing, BitTorrent, and version control are my mainstay applications I've run on my servers over the years. File servers are out of trauma; I've lost too much data to trust software or hardware, and servers are the easiest way to configure stuff like RAID/ZFS as well as automated backups. BitTorrent on a server lets me be a good citizen and seed consistently. Version control right now is Forgejo, and given the nonsense at Github this is becoming a better decision by the day. There are also a number of support services like PostgreSQL and NGINX, with CRON powered backups to the fileserver.

I installed Plex but ended up not using it, so I removed it.

* https://www.langturbo.com

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 often need to copy a sensitive string from one computer to another, and I don't want to worry about it getting preserved in the edit history of a Google Doc or whatever. A small pastebin service with basic authentication where deleted notes are deleted permanently. I use it all the time.

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.

- a micro community that a core group of people chat on every day

Both on what used to be digital ocean $5 droplets. Once I find the time and energy I will migrate everything away from DO, the price was raised but the quality and speed of their servers stayed the same.

At home: truenas and gitlab.

At home, for work: I have an older HP workstation with an older Xeon with 24 physical cores and it runs a rhel (I have them for free as a partner) and I use it to run VMs for experiments and replicating infras, K8S, Windows AD stuff, etc.

- An old desktop running alpine that hosts two minecraft servers

- Another old desktop acting as a NAS. Currently planning on migrating that to a mini lenovo pc to reduce size and unify everything. I have a single HDD that I've split into partitions for projects and Linux ISOs, currently serving over samba. It also has a transmission client on it to download the Linux ISOs. Probably the most useful box on my network

- A mini lenovo PC that runs homeassistant, and in future will probably turn into my NAS, once I can find a good storage solution for it (Not much expandability inside the box itself, but it has some usb 3 ports. Id put my existing 3.5" HDD on a usb sata adapter, but they also need 12v. Currently looking into an NVME dock or multi-terabyte laptop SSDs)

- A raspberry pi that will, in future, run my website (currently still working on the software for it)

- Tailscale exit nodes (I don't use them to stream Netflix or torrents over, but sometimes they're useful to browse "this content is not available in your region" sites, to use WhatsApp while transiting through Bejing airport, ...)

- Invidious

- FreshRSS.org

- Vaultwarden

- some silly scripts

I treat these as disposable and can spin them up again from daily backups if needed. So far the stability has been good as with more expensive infrastructure providers.

My home setup is not $5/month VPS but a sub $100 second hand thin client running KVM is used for: - Home Assistant

- Immich photo hosting

- Music Assistant

- Pihole

- Hister

- Invidious

Obviously the storage requirements for media and photos are higher, these go to a (more expensive) Synology NAS, and are backed up externally, but that's beyond the scope of this post. The Home Assistant + Pihole storage requirements are minimal.

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 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.

- fx (my own blog software)

- syncthing (sync files to remote servers for backup)

- borgbackup (store old copies of files for backup; via cron)

- radicale (calendar)

- pingvin-share-x (file sharing with other people)

- Forgejo (GitHub-like clone; using it many times a day most days)

- vaultwarden (self-hosted Bitwarden)

- immich (not really using it much)

PS: I founded a company called shpyrd (https://shpyrd.io), its very good for putting AI agents and sites/app made by Claude/Codex directly online.

- Readeck (bookmarks)

- Traggo (time tracking)

- Joplin notes sync webdav server

- Cartomancer (GPX tracks)

And some other small personal tools. https://github.com/jo-m/fluffy/tree/main/fluffy

https://olicorne.org/en/tools#helper-tools

All of those are in different containers running through podman.

Things i use daily-ish:

- Wireguard with wg-easy to access my home network and other way around to keep services i don't want to be seen on my network away from my ISP.

- Calibre-web for my ebooks

- Forgejo/Gitea as local git server + CrowCI for my hobby projects.

- Samba server to access my things over the network.

- Trillium for note taking.

- Nomad for my other more infra related projects

And it also runs a Home Assistant instance inside a docker container, and serves as an MQTT broker for my ESP devices. Everything is through a Cloudflare tunnel.

As for maintenance, your AI harness of choice combined with passwordless sudo (and a good backup system in case things go really south) can make upkeep very pleasant.

3x$5VPS: Garage S3 cluster for static sites and project builds, behind haproxy. Also runs Postgres w/ patroni and a small game server for a game I’m working on and some nameservers. My website is on all 3 VMs and has a little gimmick, where state is tracked between them.

3xOld MiniPC: Proxmox cluster for running Gitlab+Runners, monitoring vm, Valheim server, Syncthing, plus a couple of other odd projects. The oldest hw is probably close to 10 years old (NUC7) and the other two is refurbished Lenovo M710q I think, so nothing fancy.

Everything is connected- and communicate over Tailscale.

I haven't had an actual server, VPS or cloud instance running full time since about that time. Everything I have outside the house is built on serverless tech such as AWS Lambda.

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).

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.

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.

Living room has a small passively cooled n150 which runs almost 20 services, from home assistant and jellyfin, over paperless and navidrome, to some lesser known services (yamtrack, koito, grimoire). A bunch more, and I use them regularly, some more than others, but then adding a service without exposing it (my caddy lxc has 2 IPs, one port forwarded one internal only) is really cheap.

- my blog (ghost)

- an open source recipe saas

- a web based epub reader that saves current page and other state among browsers/devices

- A multi-player mexican-train domino in rust/Yjs

- A self made app i call "auto-SaaS": postgREST+empty page+AI Agent (clippy chat animation and all) that allows me to build ANY personal saas i need:

* simple aisle based supermarket shopping list (shared with my wife)

* note taking app that auto groups notes by date

* auto-scrolling news web page that I can read while stationary cycling in my tablet (AI summarized to de-editorialize)

* a battleship game! To play with someone when bored.

Among other minor stuff.

People underestimate just how much a $5 VPS can run, because they are using things written in Java, C#, Python, PHP, etc.

I had a $5 VPS once manage device is image downloads via HTTP, and had 100s of thousands of devices update themselves in a single night, with about 10k concurrent connections at peak.

That same instance later couldn't run a single Jenkins instance for a single project...

I run a private Matrix server using conduit. It has about ten active users.

The value of any VPS is what value it delivers in your daily life. Whether that's running your own VPN, mail server or just personal apps you build for yourself.

There was a phase where we ran lots of open source stuff. Now I think we'll just drop agents on these VMs and let them use it to build apps or browse the web.

[1] https://github.com/maximhq/bifrost

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.

So the 2 buck one is just stuff I want on a freestanding IP/system or where it absolutely can't be CF protected / tunneled. e.g. https://tls.obsidian.place - TLS info tool...has to be raw exposed server to work.

https://spacefightinggame.com/

I picked a dumb name though, open to suggestions!

Way way back when, I also did it to learn a bit more about daily *nix craft.

I uninstalled Claude Code from my laptop after an incident where it got stuck on an issue and started scanning my home folder for resources. Its unacceptable and scary behavior, so now it gets it own machine where it can't touch my keys.

I wrote about it a couple days ago actually https://klar.im/blog/launch-a-startup-for-15-euros-a-month

I have the Codex Linux desktop app running on there and quite enjoy building games on my TV with my kids. We just dictate silly ideas via my phone and codex builds them for us.

[0]: https://linkding.link/

Caveat: almost all of them only listen on a Tailscale network interface, so they are not directly exposed to the Internet.

It's a $9 VPS instead of $5, mostly because of the storage, but if I ever truly need it, it'll be worth 50x the price.

I do pay a little more, 16 euros per month, but this is largely to have 1TB of space.

I have had my own VPS since around 2010. Before that I was running an old Sun machine as a home server, but it was so heavy and unwieldy I gave it away when I moved.

https://www.gethisword.com

https://www.givethemlife.com

I'm also using BunnyCDN right now.

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.

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

I hope to do more, AI coding allowed me to do a lot of stuff I had been putting off for lack of energy.

(Netflix caps you at 720p to prevent you pirating it)

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.

Keeping my namecheap API key on the server means every time I make a new website I just buy the domain and tell my AI agent to SSH in and set everything up.

- 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

  Tangled Knots and Spindles
  Uptime Kuma
  Umami analytics
  Netbird
  Linklater
  Miniflux
  Seafile
  A few other small apps

Also, over there, i run my monitoring stack (prometheus+grafana etc) since it's the most stable part of my infra in terms of networking and power supply).

Using VPN Provider is an option, but i prefer no one tinker with the VPN server i am using. Also i can add unlimited client to it.

I find it easier to try out the common tools here first and then decide if you need something bigger, heavier to move to a VPS or your own server.

Matrix/XMPP server for self-hosted federated chat.

[edit] I listen to a bunch of audiobooks, so Audiobookshelf.org

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.

keycloak

immich

jellyfin

several personal sites

home assistant

unsloth studio

several synology tools on a nas (drive/security/backups)

etc...

If it's "just you" your laptop is likely fine. Hosted tools really start to shine when you've got a group of folks using them. Ex - Wife/Parents/Kids/Extended Family.

Simple k3s cluster and the shallow end of kubernetes actually saves you a ton of time and effort (don't go into complex orchestrators or helm charts - just write small deployments in static yaml). You can get to roughly the same spot with just docker/compose if you want, but the capabilities cap out earlier (ex - multi-machine, resilient to any one machine going down, gpu sharding, etc)

Maintenance is basically "sudo pacman -Syyu" on a cron job.

https://almeidapaulopt.github.io/tsdproxy/

- Jellyfin

- Vaultwarden

- Immich

- pi agent. I use it through tmux and iSH on my iPhone

- librechat. nice UI but honestly I probably jsut use pi more often

- copyparty. to visually inspect whatever I create with pi, and to access my documents, to upload files I need on the server quickly and easily from any device

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.

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.

I think it's saving me about $8 to $10 a day that I was previously spending on GH Actions.

VERY worth it.

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.

I also have another one of a similar price coloated in Luxembourg, for reasons which are legal in Luxembourg.

- Cheap VPS is nice for electric & network reliability (mail servers, public facing website or webapp)

- local hosting is nice for price/control/internal tools (some git and maven, different tools)

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.

Also have my resume and other such projects on the server

https://github.com/pkulak/barnaby-home

Host bitwarden and gitea which are useful too.

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 use mine as basically an open test server I can play with

Runs IRC bouncer, some scraping jobs, samba server for the family (mostly music and films), backs up our IMAP boxes (on iCloud and other providers).

So I have a VPS running for thoses downloads and any that slow.

Handy to have a non commercial VPN solution you can deploy in any region.

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.

It's just a gtd inbox and consumes nothing, but I can just empty my mind and save my adhd brain from drifting to all those butteflies.

* Podcast subscriptions and syncs (queue, playtime)

* Ditto for YouTube

* Self-made and self-played online web game

(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.

Their backend is just a json file, which I GET and PUT with Nginx + WebDav + Basic Auth

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

Owning your email is nice, and save you sone bucks if you want family accounts.

Using this, i can expose services on my home server without giving access to the internet to probe on it. I can host an immich server and not be afraid that someone can access it

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

DNS servers

[EDIT]: wireguard node for my private VPN

- vpn exit node

- personal email server

Disclaimer: Creator

2. Rendezvous server ("supernode")

my workloads are suited to serverless platforms like Cloudflare.

I have a media server I run on a spare desktop, and at one point was messing around with https://syncthing.net/ for a self-hosted form of Dropbox. More recently, I'm using a VPS to run some internet scraping jobs for things I want to monitor, like apartment listings in NYC (where I live).

Of course, I also use this to run long-running cloud coding agents! Basically exactly what DHH's AI shed is. You need something stronger than $5-$10 / month VPS. I connect with https://herdr.dev/ for persistence

Because of how relevant the "AI shed" concept is, I would be remiss to mention my startup: https://www.amika.dev/

Amika lets you turn any computer into an always-on, network-connectable, AI shed. It's not ready for primetime quite yet (beta launching soon), but I use it for all my dev work

It's partially open source, which is here: https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika

Before using VPSes, I hosted from my home IP directly. This has serious privacy downsides: from your IP address, it’s mostly trivial to find out who you are (e.g., by seeing your IP has port 443 open and checking the domain names of your TLS certificates), and from your domain name, it’s trivial to find out where you live (by way of the ISP whose IP address your domain points to). Using a VPN for general browsing helps with the first point but not the second. There’s also the threat of DDOS (if your server gets attacked you lose access to the Internet entirely, and then you’re really in trouble). Also, residential ISPs are rare and people who need a static IP (or even a non‐CGNAT IP) are not reliably catered to; VPS companies have plenty of competition and having a publicly accessible IP address is the default.

Once I started running VPSes, I ran many services directly on the VPS. Over the years, I’ve migrated everything to physical hardware in my house (or a secure offsite location), for privacy and performance reasons. I can add as much storage and RAM as I want. Incoming connections are port‐forwarded over WireGuard to my LAN, so the VPS provider can only gather metadata from encrypted connections. Unfortunately the game servers mostly don’t support TLS; I’d prefer to hide them behind a VPN, but that would be too difficult for the players.

I actually use three VPSes, each in a different datacenter. VPS downtime (that’s not caused by me) is pretty rare, but happens periodically, and is almost entirely due to maintenance being performed in the datacenter. Email and DNS both support redundancy.

My VPSes are from different providers, too. One time an OS bug caused high CPU usage for an extended time, and the provider nearly terminated my account on suspicion of crypto mining. If a particular company ever drops me or goes out of business, I can just change a few DNS records and firewall rules and be back in business.

The vast majority of my downtime has been from power outages at home and the residential ISP going down (it's crazy how often that happens, I had no idea until I started measuring it). So I got a second residential ISP. If one route goes down, the VPSes port forward over the other, or over a third route to my offsite LAN.

Each service runs in a separate VM. Some might consider that overkill, but I like how simple it is to move VMs between hosts. Services run as unprivileged non‐root users with no ability to initiate outgoing connections.

Services for which I’m the only user stay entirely within the LAN. I do have extrnal access to the LAN, three ways: WireGuard, SSH, and HTTP proxy. The proxy is a last resort, but it’s been a lifesaver when I was stuck for a week at a conference whose wifi blocked SSH and WireGuard (in fact, everything but HTTPS and DNS).

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

One of them is something I've been hacking on recently: hnfollow.com

But have a whole lot of small services that I run for friends and family too.

The price was low enough that I left it running.

The VPS is useful for:

- sending e-mails (hard to improve your reputation on residential IPs and get a reverse DNS record)

- Unifi controller, though I appreciate Unifi less and less.

- Uptime monitoring / status page

- I think I'll move my headscale node there, since it has the highest availability -- Internet was out for a week last month, which is exceptional, but rarer in a DC

- backup Internet connection (especially incoming packets, as it's hard to port forward on mobile Internet).

- netdata for monitoring

Now, I use my servers a lot more:

- HomeAssistant on all of them

- power monitoring to warn of power cuts when not at home (freezers!)

- netdata

- yggdrasil

And for the one beefier instance:

- esphome

- Wireguard links between it and all nodes/VPS, plus a few devices -- I like Wireguard, but Tailscale is much easier to manage for full mesh and just adding personal devices.

- jellfin, *arr and torrents

- calibre web (mostly humble bundle DRM-free books, actually)

- e-mails (receive, I should make it more redundant though)

- Matrix server (synapse). For years this was the most resource intensive service. It's much better now. I do not recommend due to spam waves.

- headscale

- Nextcloud, OnlyOffice, Kanboard: for productivity

- Prometheus, grafana & monitorix: monitoring, plus netdata aggregating data from other nodes

- Open Sondage, Framadate, I hate money: for friend groups

- Vaultwarden: password storage

- Wallabag (should use it more or may retire soon)

- Ntfy: for UnifiedPush

- LDAP server: for centralized auth

- Borg backup

- Some custom web apps and probably more I forgot

Services I plan to host soon: Garage (S3), split across nodes, Ente (currently using the hosted version)

Services I retired or only start on demand: Funkwhale, Peertube, ampache, overleaf, ethercalc & etherpad (both had too high CPU use on idle, not worth 5-10W). At some point I had game servers behind systemd socket activation to only turn them on on-demand.

Yunohost is pretty good for starting, but it's quite amateurish, I prefer declarative configs and containerization these days.

I also think pretty hard about ways to get my power usage down (around 30-40 W on my main, next upgrade should bring it to 25), so I'm monitoring the usage and correlating to power use (via a smart plug). I wish there were more turn-key solutions for putting nodes to sleep in kubernetes & others, I'll likely investigate this at some point. Tiered storage systems also tends to focus on perf, not power efficiency.

And yes, I'm considering moving more things behind tailscale to reduce the attack surface. Some containers listen to localhost and I use ssh -D to access them, but tailscale would be more convenient.

For as the primary functionality of your local computer is as a desktop then you do indeed need to be running a server(be it a VPS, dedicated server or whatever).

Otherwise, then I would ask the question? What do you use your local computer for? Playing games? Sounds childish

The bottomline will remain, there's functionality you can get from a $5/month VPS that you can never get out of a desktop. Do I really need to list them? Probably not because they're too obvious. I mean, a server gives you access to the internet.

But, anyways, I forget servers are not useful anymore because we have all move to the AI protocol :-)