Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?
I'm thinking about getting a small $5–10/month VPS after reading DHH's "AI shed" idea. I've had personal servers before and like having something always on, but I'm not sure the maintenance is worth it when most things can just run on my laptop. I tend to do things myself and only later realize I could have automated or delegated them, so I may have a blind spot. If you have a cheap VPS or mini PC, what actually ended up being useful long-term?
- ehe78qhe
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.
- throwaway81523
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.
- kaydub
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.
- dzonga
if I wanna experiment on a server this days - use old laptop.
my workloads are suited to serverless platforms like Cloudflare.
- chowchowchow
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.
- Venn1
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.
- bawolff
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.
- pan69
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).