oh no, i’m thinking about a VPS again
Early on as I went more seriously into making my website, I briefly put selfhosting (as in, either own hardware or renting one) as a future thing to look into and learn. Then the static website hosting providers I used were pretty comfortable and I didn’t have to worry about configuration, security, updates, backups, bandwidth, uptime, bots, and more. I could just pay and have everything handled for me, so I forgot about it.
From the beginning, there were always people who said that anyone should just rent their own server immediately because sooner or later, you’d want that, and it would be great to get into the habits of configuring your server from the get-go instead of getting used to services holding your hand and doing everything for you.
I don’t agree with this. I think for most people, it’s too steep of a learning curve and bars them from doing anything in the first place. If I first would have had to get my own server setup running, I wouldn’t have ever created a website. But they might have been right about “you’ll want this later” and I wish they weren’t! 😩
I am kind of tired of not having a playground to play with, somewhere that I can just put stuff on without much restriction. Right now, all hosting I have is Bearblog, Nekoweb and now Github Pages. The blog will always stay here on Bear, but I’d love to have a place to port a backup to with the tool by mgx. For the other two, it’s just so focused on websites and with some (understandable) file size and type restrictions. What if I want my own Jellyfin server, or any other projects and services? What if in the future, I wanna host social media/Discord alternatives for my friends? I also would love to use Gitea (or maybe GitLab) instead of something Microslop-owned.
So I guess I am considering it again for my website and my new notes vault (wiki). The problem I see is that it’s pretty intimidating right now to be mostly left alone hosting anything public-facing (not just you and your private media server), seeing as people everywhere are complaining about the onslaught of AI crawlers DDoSing their websites, horror stories about astronomical costs due to that, or the website being down often because of the price cap they set being exhausted. I neither want my site to be down, nor surprise astronomical costs. Then there’s individual hosting stories that scare me off (Vercel especially!) and things like paying per deployment, more legal obligations and vulnerabilities that I’m not used to with the comfort I’ve had so far.
There’s a lot to consider… but when I think of the future, I just don’t see how it would make sense paying for multiple restrictive SaaS (or rely on some even more restrictive free tier) when I could pay less and throw it all on my rented server. No more comparing services for some things or worrying how long they’ll last.
I hope to find out more about how people who rent VPS or even fully self-host handle all these issues.
edit
Thank you to everyone for the great feedback and tips. I thought I'd edit the post with the advice I received via email in case anyone ever needs it.
- Steven's DDNS and reverse proxy setup
- Testing and trying out some stuff on old hardware you have lying around (I may consider this)
- When both using VPS and selfhosting, Caddy webservers can be useful to point to either different services on the VPS or services at home via a VPN and allows to apply a whitelist so that only certain IPs (like trusted VPN IP's) can actually access services.
- Dominik Hofer's writeup of setting up a VPS based on a Youtube video by CJ on the Syntax channel. I love this one especially, the site design is a sight for sore eyes.
- Coolify is an open-source and self-hostable Vercel alternative. Lets you install common apps with very few clicks.
- Marty's post about hosting a website on a new server
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Published 17 Jun, 2025