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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Are all these people saying Hermes bots or something?

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

I recently started an AT Proto PDS.

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.

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

Self hosting nebula

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... )

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.

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

Right this minute I've got wireguard and caddy up.

1. Authoritative DNS server

2. Rendezvous server ("supernode")

reverse proxy

Hermes and an Orca dev server

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.

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[flagged]