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 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.
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.
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.
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.
On my home server (just an older desktop PC)
- qBittorrent for "Linux ISOs"
- Jellyfin so I can watch/read/listen to my "Linux ISOs"
- Tailscale so me, my family and friends can watch/read/listen to my "Linux ISOs" from anywhere in the world
- Self hosting my photo albums. Immich is a handy choice for this. Very useful for personal photos you don't want to trust to strange tech companies.
- Gitea for self-hosting git repos for some personal projects I have not open-sourced.
I 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 run a language learning app* on a single VPS, for free. I'm not sure if you can still get it, but Oracle used to offer very generous VPS for free. I have a 4 CPUs, 24 GB memory VPS that I'm using for several things, including running the backend and the marketing site for that app.
I installed Plex but ended up not using it, so I removed it.
* https://www.langturbo.com
dns and email server. i just make aliases that point to a single imap account that is unique for everything i sign up for. if i start to get spam, turn off the alias. it also lets me see who is selling my info or has been hacked when bestbuy@example.com starts getting emails from russia.
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.
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.
Deploy a vpn
1. Authoritative DNS server
2. Rendezvous server ("supernode")
Hermes and an Orca dev 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.