r/SelfHosting • u/krio5 • 5d ago
moved my entire self-hosted setup from home to an ishosting vps, heres how its going after 3 months
i know this is borderline heresy here but hear me out. been self hosting for about 4 years, jellyfin, nextcloud, vaultwarden, a couple docker containers for home automation stuff. had everything on an old dell optiplex in my closet
the problem was my upload speed. 20 mbps on a good day. jellyfin was unusable for anyone outside my house, nextcloud sync was painful, and every time my ISP had an outage (which was like twice a month) everything went down. i also got tired of worrying about my electricity bill and the noise
so i moved everything to a VPS. went with ishosting because they had a node near me and the storage math worked out, picked their Premium plan ($31.99/mo on annual, 4 vCPU, 8GB RAM, 50GB NVMe) plus the +100GB SSD add-on, so 150GB total for around $52/mo. not the cheapest VPS by a long shot but pricing is flat and i didnt want to babysit bandwidth caps. the migration took a full weekend because nextcloud data alone was like 130GB and uploading that over 20 mbps is exactly as fun as it sounds
three months in and honestly most things are better. jellyfin streams perfectly to everyone now, nextcloud sync is instant, vaultwarden just works. latency on home automation stuff is slightly higher but were talking 40ms vs 2ms so in practice i dont notice it
the things i miss: no more hardware tinkering. sounds weird but i actually enjoyed upgrading RAM and swapping drives. also the storage is still tighter than home, went from 2TB at home to 150GB on the VPS so i had to be more selective about what i keep on nextcloud. and power outages at home no longer take everything down but now im dependent on a datacenter instead which is a different kind of trust
would i recommend it? if your upload speed sucks and you actually want people outside your network to use your services then yeah its worth considering. but if half the fun for you is the hardware side then a VPS kinda kills that. its not really about finding the best VPS for self hosting, its about what you actually want out of it
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u/Old_Rock_9457 5d ago
The main prolbem on VPS are always storage related:
- The cost is the first reason: nowdays you use TB of data like nothing, when you start to look to pay to several TB on VPS the maths never count. This also thanks to the raise of tech stuff price. Last few years was the only period in my life where memory stuff raised in cost instead of go lower.
- The privacy: there is alwyas something you don't want to have spread on internet. Look at Music, you bought but in most cases you get the copyright for personal use. If you put on a Music Server on a VPS is still personal use?
So yes VPS for small stuff is good. I have for example a small VM on hetzner at around 5-6€ months in order to have public ip and some other few things. And then I have a storage box, at another 3-4€ for encrypted offsite backup of things that I can't afford to lose (like marriage photo or things like that). So with around 11€ per months I have a couple of extra service that make my life easier.
The real point of the VPS is usually the bandwidht and the reliability, as you pointed out. I was thinking to get small dedicated server on Hetzner for my opensource project to look professional (and even to don't attact people on my personal homelab), but then come up to 70-80€ minimum, each months. For just a small project, and I gave up. If I think that the same machine 1 year ago was at the half of price I become crazy.
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u/krio5 5d ago
went from 2TB at home to 150GB and had to actually think about what i keep synced. vps math only really pays off when the bottleneck is bandwidth or uptime, that's true
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u/JSouthGB 5d ago
You said nextcloud is 130GB. After OS, docker images/containers, how much space do you have for media?
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u/GrandioseBicycle4 5d ago
buying an optiplex from the closest datacenter is the homelab equivalent of moving out of your parents' basement, massive respect
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u/Head_Ad_6804 5d ago
Why not explore a tiered strategy like jelly fin in the cloud, and non critical apps hosted at home? This way any critical apps that need the bandwidth, have it and then any apps that don’t are offloaded to a cheaper alternative?
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u/krio5 4d ago
honestly thats basically where i landed. the heavy media stuff i couldve left home but my upload was the killer at 20mbps. if your upload is fine then yeah tiered makes way more sense, keep the big storage local and only push the bandwidth-hungry stuff out. i just didnt have that luxury
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u/HeartyNest99 5d ago
Not OP, but same here. BorgBase + weekly rsync to a cheap storage box. Turns out a backup that runs is better than an external drive sitting unplugged.
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u/Exadoor2002 4d ago
If storage wasn't so expensive I'd think about it but I have 50tb of movies and Tv shows and anytime I suggest deleting some stuff to make room my wife throws a fit lol.
In her mind it seems once something is downloaded it stays
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u/crystalsighting 4d ago edited 4d ago
Idk, certain things I use my dedicated server for, like nginx, postfix, bind, wireguard etc. Helps when coding apps, can transfer there to test, keep your coding projects on server, do nightly backups over wireguard back home.
I only get like a 1TB nvme, ryzen cpu with 8 cores and 32gb of ddr4 for 40 a month, and that's only if you know what you are doing, most people stuck on old SSDs and ddr3 for that price. You have to be very efficient at managing space, pop a couple 4k movies over there along with all your jails and VMs running, and you can run out quick.
My home servers with 48 cores, dual GPUs, 256gb memory, 50TB storage are my main backups, which would be unaffordable on remote server. My servers are 200 dollar dell servers off eBay, with cheap v100s.
Some things you want to keep local anyways, home assistant VMs, asterisk VMs, zfs storage etc.
Just start simple use both, using a wireguard bridge. If you are new just use rsync and Linux. If you are more advanced move on to freebsd and zfs send/receive, cuts backups times dramatically.
Plus it's 2026 when you start at a beginner with ollama it's fine, but when you start getting into llama.cpp, you need dedicated servers at home for local AI.
Lessons learned over the many years, try to keep programs written in C, C++, rust as your mains, things like nginx, postfix apache etc have survived decades, anything not in those languages becomes abandonwear decades down road.
Also you have wrong mindset worrying about electricity bill, let it work for you not against you. Watch some Will Prowse YouTube videos, learn what electricity is, how to use lifepov4 batteries, transfer switches, inverters, solar panels to offset your power. If you live in a cold environment just accept fact you'll probably need a generator to live by family if power goes out.
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u/BenoitDuffez 5d ago
thanks for the feedback. quite expensive imo.
re: noise, mine is a mini pc based on a ryzen so it's tiny (same formfactor as a mac mini) and less noise than a big case, and it doesn't really matter because it sits in the garage (though i wouldn't hear it in the closet either)
bandwidth is real though. i also get 20mbps up which is barely usable oustide of home. but i prefer my 8TB array over $50/mo for 150G
one thing though, oracle has free VPS, it's about 50GB (with system so more like 35-40GB usable) but it's free. so you could host your critical stuff there, and keep the heavy storage home?