It has been about six months since I started running services on my VPS. Time for an honest look at what worked, what did not, and what I would do differently. What works well Static sites are effortless. Hugo plus Nginx has been zero-maintenance. I deploy with a script, and it just works. No crashes, no updates to worry about, no dependencies to manage. This has been the most clearly worthwhile thing I self-host. ...
Knowing when your server is down before your users do is the bare minimum of responsible self-hosting. I have tried several monitoring approaches and settled on a setup that is simple, free, and has been reliable for months. Uptime Kuma Uptime Kuma is the core of my monitoring stack. It is a self-hosted monitoring tool that checks HTTP endpoints, TCP ports, DNS records, and ping targets at configurable intervals. Installation is one Docker command: ...
I wanted an independent way to test the connection speed to my server without relying on third-party services. LibreSpeed is an open-source speed test that you can host yourself. There is also a Go backend called speedtest-go that is self-contained and easy to deploy. This post covers setting up speedtest-go with a systemd service and an Nginx reverse proxy. Why self-host a speed test Public speed test services measure the connection between you and their servers, which is useful but does not tell you much about the connection to your specific server. A self-hosted instance measures exactly what you care about: the bandwidth and latency between a client and your VPS. ...
I have been running various services on my VPS for a while now. Some have been worth the effort, others were not. Here is where I have landed. Worth self-hosting Static sites and personal projects. This is the easiest category. A static site generator plus Nginx is trivial to maintain. No database, no runtime dependencies, minimal attack surface. Updates are a git pull and a rebuild. I cannot think of a reason to use a managed service for this. ...
I wanted a blog on my VPS that would cost almost nothing in resources. Static site generators were the obvious choice, and after looking at a few options I went with Hugo. Why Hugo The main appeal is simplicity. Hugo is a single binary. There is no runtime, no dependency tree, no Node modules folder growing to 800 MB. You write Markdown, run one command, and get a folder of HTML files ready to serve. ...