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

DHH's "AI shed" idea got me thinking about getting a small $5–10/month VPS.

I'm a Linux guy and have on many points of my life have a personal server. So I like the idea of having something always on, but I’m not sure the maintenance is worth it when most things can just run on my laptop.

That said, I tend to do things myself and only later realize I could have automated or delegated them, so I may have a blind spot here.

If you have a cheap VPS or mini PC, what actually ended up being useful long-term? Anything that saved enough time or replaced enough subscriptions to justify keeping it around?

15 points | by mariocesar 6 hours ago

9 comments

  • jbarberu 1 hour ago
    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.

  • sebnun 3 hours ago
    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

  • ogou 1 hour ago
    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.
  • mikewarot 16 minutes ago
    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.

  • browningstreet 29 minutes ago
    Hermes and an Orca dev server
  • dare944 3 hours ago
    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.

  • 1vuio0pswjnm7 1 hour ago
    1. Authoritative DNS server

    2. Rendezvous server ("supernode")

  • Sha1rholder 4 hours ago
    Deploy a vpn
  • Computer0 4 hours ago
    I'm fairly certain that DHH fella is Nazi adjacent.

    If you don't have a use maybe you do not have a use?