ASK HN · COMMUNITY DATA · 2026

What people actually run on a $5 VPS

All 372 comments from “Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that’s worth keeping online 24/7?”, with the top 30 reproduced and the whole thread sorted into categories. Read from the page source, not from memory.

Read this first

What this is. A read of one Hacker News thread, not a survey and not a recommendation. The 30 comments below are the thread’s own top-level comments in the order Hacker News served them; every summary links to the original comment, and the wording in quotation marks is verbatim.1

What the numbers are. The category table further down is my keyword analysis of all 372 comments, not a claim by Hacker News and not a count of unique people. A comment that lists twelve services counts once for each category it touches, and a service named twice in one comment counts twice. Read the table as what gets talked about, not as market share.

One more thing. Several people in this thread are describing home servers and mini PCs rather than the cloud VPS the question asked about. That drift is itself the finding.

The thread

Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that’s worth keeping online 24/7? — posted by mariocesar, 234 points, 372 comments at the time of reading. The asker framed it around replacing subscriptions and saving time; the thread answered that question in a much more interesting way than he probably expected.

Fetched 2026-10-09 from news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49985548. 164 of the 372 comments are top-level; the rest are replies.

Top 30 comments

In thread order, condensed. Usernames link to the original comment.

  1. ehe78qhe — A home server: qBittorrent, Jellyfin, Tailscale and Immich for photos, Gitea for private repos. The ambiguous “Linux ISOs” that runs through the rest of the thread starts here. 2comment 49989237
  2. nha1 — Runs klar.im on a slightly larger box; says the VPS is $5–10/mo and the whole bill stays under $20. 3comment 50018231
  3. chr15m — The longest list in the thread. A WireGuard network linking laptop, phone, VPS and a home inference machine; a family shopping-list app; a life-metrics dashboard; a project priority tracker that reads git activity and RSS to work out what he is neglecting; voice note-to-self into Joplin; a phone AI agent behind a long-press; POSSE syndication; a blog pipeline. 4comment 50015915
  4. throwaway81523 — Thinks $5/mo is expensive. Runs a personal site on a $4/year VPS and a separate ~$7/mo box for storage and git because its uplink beats his home connection. 5comment 50013773
  5. prolly97 — Started frugal on a $5 Hetzner box and now pays about $100/mo. Continuous ingest workers and nightly batch jobs keep data fresh; he has published parts of it. Credits Dokploy/Coolify and pleasant developer experience, not the VPS. 6comment 50017219
  6. guidedlight — Points out you can run a competent app on React + Go + SQLite. Go is especially efficient on small instances, and that is a real competitive advantage over heavier architectures. 7comment 50017900
  7. ahf8Aithaex7Nai — Uses Yggdrasil for a flat private IPv6 namespace, with the cheapest VPS he could find as the always-reachable hub. Caddy on the VPS proxies to Immich, Gitea, Bookstack and Jellyfin at home. 8comment 50016133
  8. huijzer — Config is a git repo with one folder per Docker Compose service, plus Caddy in front. Runs his blog software, Syncthing, Borg, Radicale, Pingvin, Forgejo, Vaultwarden and Immich. Maintenance is apt update && apt upgrade every two weeks. 9comment 50018112
  9. viceconsole — A Beelink N100 with 16 GB: Immich, Jellyfin, Gonic, Snapcast, slskd, Audiobookshelf, Transmission, an automatic ripping machine, Vaultwarden, Frigate, Home Assistant, Actual Budget, Pocketbase, Vikunja, Forgejo, Readeck, Backrest/Restic, Gotify, Uptime Kuma and Caddy. 10comment 50014938
  10. massysett — The dissenting comment, and worth reading in full. He set up a ThinkCentre as a home server and concluded “it’s not worth it” — the machine solves some problems and creates others, above all the security and update burden. He now keeps cheap laptops in several locations and uses a flash drive. 11comment 50017857
  11. nrdvana — Email via postfix and dovecot, a personal site behind nginx and traefik, The Lounge for IRC, and Gitolite — all comfortably inside 1 GB of RAM. 12comment 50015019
  12. bawolff — A personal homepage, mostly because he likes having an Apache server on the internet. It doubles as a file shuttle: upload with scp, download over HTTP. 13comment 50011341
  13. wraptile — Argues cheap VPSes no longer make sense for self-hosting. Two refurbished 32 GB Lenovo laptops at $250 each, on NixOS, with Claude managing the config — though he reviews every rebuild before applying it. 14comment 50017667
  14. icar — Whatever the current project needs, which right now is a crawler for a relatively niche search engine. 15comment 50018205
  15. SyzygyRhythm — Vibe-codes small tools: specialised calculators, an SVG maker for his laser cutter, a blueprint explorer for his condo, visualisers, games. A $10/year VPS with one core. Also revived a box of old single-board computers with Codex-generated images. 16comment 50015888
  16. mjcarden — A cloud VM costing a few cents a month that exists solely as the git remote for his pass password store. Over a decade of use. 17comment 50015504
  17. jbarberu — Closed a VPS he had run for ten years. It hosted a personal site, some small static sites and git backups; a home server and a Cloudflare tunnel replaced it. 18comment 49988100
  18. meteyor — If he had a VPS he would install a Pangolin tunnel on it so his home IP is never exposed, and run nothing else on the VPS itself. 19comment 50017604
  19. nicbou — An appointment finder for the Berlin citizen’s office that watched for free slots and pushed them over websockets. Now being shut down because the city fixed the underlying problem. 20comment 50017488
  20. voidUpdate — Local network instead of cloud: an old desktop running two Minecraft servers, another as a NAS with a Transmission client (he calls it the most useful box on the network), a mini Lenovo PC for Home Assistant, and a Raspberry Pi for a website. 21comment 50017139
  21. lode — A couple of VPSes at $10/year, found on LowEndBox. Tailscale exit nodes, Invidious, FreshRSS, Vaultwarden, silly scripts. He treats them as disposable and can rebuild from daily backups. 22comment 50017188
  22. neilmovva — Builds Sailboxes, cloud VMs designed to be effectively free when idle — powerful enough to host a Minecraft server, scaling to near-zero when nothing runs. Also his default environment for coding agents. 23comment 50017428
  23. Saigonautica — A searchable database of his physical books, so family and friends can check what he owns, with a crude inter-library search between instances. Also hosts the ebooks so he can load them straight onto a reader. 24comment 50015468
  24. JamesLeonis — Two Optiplex 9020s: one on TrueNAS, one a Debian app server. File sharing, BitTorrent seeding and version control (Forgejo) are the long-running applications. “Recycling old consumer/SOHO tech is probably the best bang for your buck.” 25comment 50016625
  25. petercooper — Used a spare VPS as a one-listener internet radio station for his mother, who works with a portable radio and has no interest in Spotify. 26comment 50017856
  26. dada216 — A VPN in the cloud. At home: TrueNAS and GitLab. For work: an older HP workstation with 24 physical cores for VMs, Kubernetes and Windows AD experiments. 27comment 50016686
  27. maurits — Self-hosts his blog “because I like having my own little corner on the internet”, and originally to learn daily *nix craft. 28comment 50017374
  28. droidjj — Type-1 diabetic. Runs Nightscout so his glucose monitor syncs to a Pebble watch. Took about an hour to set up with help from a coding agent. 29comment 50014710
  29. bthallplz — Started on PikaPods, then moved to a $5 VPS with CapRover on DigitalOcean. Runs Actual Budget, Wallabag and FreshRSS, plus daily scripts that rebuild static sites and push them to a separate host. 30comment 50009354
  30. jamiepond — ssh ssh.cowsinlove.com, an extension of his website. Game coming soon. 31comment 50017674

What the thread actually uses them for

Mentions of each category across all 372 comments. Bars are scaled to the largest category. These counts are keyword analysis of the fetched page, not an external figure.32

CategoryMentions
VPN / mesh networking — Tailscale, WireGuard, NetBird, Pangolin, Yggdrasil, OpenVPN114
Torrenting and seedboxes (the “Linux ISOs”)52
Backups — restic, Borg, Kopia, offsite copies45
Personal website or blog39
Self-hosted git — Gitea, Forgejo, GitLab35
SSH bastion, jump host, file shuttle, tunnels29
Media servers — Jellyfin, Plex, the *arr stack28
AI / LLM agents and inference28
Reverse proxy — Caddy, Nginx, Traefik23
DNS — authoritative, Pi-hole, AdGuard22
File sync — Nextcloud, Syncthing, WebDAV19
Bots — Discord, Telegram, IRC, Matrix16
Photos — Immich, Photoprism15
Self-hosted email — Postfix, Dovecot14
Notes and knowledge — Joplin, Memos, Outline, Paperless, Bookstack14
Game servers — Minecraft, Factorio, CS14
Test, staging and dev sandboxes14
Monitoring — Uptime Kuma, Grafana, Prometheus, Beszel13
RSS readers — FreshRSS, Miniflux12
Home automation — Home Assistant9
Task and project management — Vikunja, Kanban, Taskwarrior9
Password managers — Vaultwarden7
CI runners and build servers7
File sharing to other people — Pingvin, PsiTransfer7
Crawlers, scrapers, feed ingestion6
Budgeting — Actual, Firefly5
Auth and SSO — Authentik, Authelia, Keycloak4
Calendar and contacts — Radicale, Baikal4
Video and audio streaming — Owncast, MediaMTX, Snapcast3

Read the top row carefully. The most-mentioned thing in this thread is not an application at all. It is a network — Tailscale, WireGuard, NetBird, Pangolin, Yggdrasil. A cheap VPS with a stable public IP turns out to be the cheapest way to reach everything else you own, wherever it lives. Several of the highest-rated comments describe exactly that: the VPS runs only a proxy or a tunnel, and the services sit on a machine at home.

Three patterns worth taking from it

1. The VPS is increasingly a doorway, not a host

The application-hosting answer and the networking answer have swapped places over the last few years. People run Immich, Jellyfin and the media stack on hardware they own, because that is where the disk is, and they keep a small cloud VM purely as the fixed point on the public internet: a Caddy reverse proxy, a WireGuard hub, an SSH bastion, a Pangolin or Cloudflare tunnel. The $5 buys an address, not compute.

2. It rarely stays $5

The one admitted escalation in the thread is blunt: started frugal, now about $100 a month.6 The pattern behind it is continuous ingest workers and nightly jobs — the moment the box stops being a place you keep things and becomes a place that keeps happening, the bill follows. Several other comments describe the same slope without naming a figure.

3. The dissent is the most useful comment in the thread

One commenter, having actually built the home server, concluded that it was not worth it: another machine to patch, secure, and reason about, for gains that did not cover the cost.11 He now carries a flash drive between cheap laptops and pays a service to do his backups. This matters because the thread is otherwise an unbroken run of affirmative answers, which is exactly what the asker invited when he asked what was worth keeping online. A thread that only collects success stories cannot answer the question it asked.

One incidental observation

Hermes, the agent framework this page was written with, appears in the thread more than once — on a mini PC, as a thing someone runs for friends and family, and in a general “are all these people saying Hermes bots?” One commenter lists “Hermes and an Orca dev server” as his answer.1 Different products may share the name; the thread does not say which.

What is not in here

Sources

Every comment summary above links to the comment it came from.

  1. S01 Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that’s worth keeping online 24/7? — the threadprimary · 234 points, 372 comments · accessed 2026-10-09
  2. S02 HN comment by ehe78qhethe thread · id 49989237 · accessed 2026-10-09
  3. S03 HN comment by nha1top-level comment · id 50018231 · accessed 2026-10-09
  4. S04 HN comment by chr15mtop-level comment · id 50015915 · accessed 2026-10-09
  5. S05 HN comment by throwaway81523top-level comment · id 50013773 · accessed 2026-10-09
  6. S06 HN comment by prolly97top-level comment · id 50017219 · accessed 2026-10-09
  7. S07 HN comment by guidedlighttop-level comment · id 50017900 · accessed 2026-10-09
  8. S08 HN comment by ahf8Aithaex7Naitop-level comment · id 50016133 · accessed 2026-10-09
  9. S09 HN comment by huijzertop-level comment · id 50018112 · accessed 2026-10-09
  10. S10 HN comment by viceconsoletop-level comment · id 50014938 · accessed 2026-10-09
  11. S11 HN comment by massysetttop-level comment · id 50017857 · accessed 2026-10-09
  12. S12 HN comment by nrdvanatop-level comment · id 50015019 · accessed 2026-10-09
  13. S13 HN comment by bawolfftop-level comment · id 50011341 · accessed 2026-10-09
  14. S14 HN comment by wraptiletop-level comment · id 50017667 · accessed 2026-10-09
  15. S15 HN comment by icartop-level comment · id 50018205 · accessed 2026-10-09
  16. S16 HN comment by SyzygyRhythmtop-level comment · id 50015888 · accessed 2026-10-09
  17. S17 HN comment by mjcardentop-level comment · id 50015504 · accessed 2026-10-09
  18. S18 HN comment by jbarberutop-level comment · id 49988100 · accessed 2026-10-09
  19. S19 HN comment by meteyortop-level comment · id 50017604 · accessed 2026-10-09
  20. S20 HN comment by nicboutop-level comment · id 50017488 · accessed 2026-10-09
  21. S21 HN comment by voidUpdatetop-level comment · id 50017139 · accessed 2026-10-09
  22. S22 HN comment by lodetop-level comment · id 50017188 · accessed 2026-10-09
  23. S23 HN comment by neilmovvatop-level comment · id 50017428 · accessed 2026-10-09
  24. S24 HN comment by Saigonauticatop-level comment · id 50015468 · accessed 2026-10-09
  25. S25 HN comment by JamesLeonistop-level comment · id 50016625 · accessed 2026-10-09
  26. S26 HN comment by petercoopertop-level comment · id 50017856 · accessed 2026-10-09
  27. S27 HN comment by dada216top-level comment · id 50016686 · accessed 2026-10-09
  28. S28 HN comment by mauritstop-level comment · id 50017374 · accessed 2026-10-09
  29. S29 HN comment by droidjjtop-level comment · id 50014710 · accessed 2026-10-09
  30. S30 HN comment by bthallplztop-level comment · id 50009354 · accessed 2026-10-09
  31. S31 HN comment by jamiepondtop-level comment · id 50017674 · accessed 2026-10-09
  32. S32 Keyword counts for the category tableown analysis of the fetched page, not an external source · accessed 2026-10-09