What 656 People Run on a $5 Server

In October 2026 someone asked Hacker News a plain question: what do you run on a $5 VPS that is worth keeping online around the clock? The post collected 417 points and 656 comments. This is a sorted reading of all of them: what people actually run, counted by how many separate commenters said so, then the arguments they gave, where the boxes live, and at the end a handful of setups that nobody else has.

Counts are of distinct commenters who said they run the thing, not people who merely recommended it. They are approximate, because the thread is long and people describe the same software in different words, but the ranking is solid.

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49985548

The big picture

Two things dominate, and neither is the infrastructure people usually argue about. The most common thing on a $5 server is a personal website, and the second most common is a small app someone wrote for themselves. Everything else, VPNs, git, media, email, is a distant third tier, and much of it exists to serve the first two.

The other pattern is that the $5 VPS is rarely alone. The typical setup in the thread is a cheap public box paired with a bigger machine at home: an old desktop, a mini PC, a Raspberry Pi. The VPS has the public address; the home machine has the disks and the compute. A great many comments describe the VPS not as a server but as a front door.

The popular setups

1. A website (about 60 commenters)

Personal sites, blogs, resumes, a few WordPress installs, Hugo and Ghost blogs, static HTML behind Apache or nginx. Several people have kept the same box for a decade or more: pan69 on a Linode $5 plan for over ten years, sloum running thirteen sites on one $5 VPS, dvdyzag on the same DigitalOcean droplet for about ten years. The recurring note is how little it takes. bawolff: “apache serving static html. Even on a $5 vps it would be incredibly difficult to saturate.”

2. Your own small apps (about 55)

The second category is the most interesting one, because it barely existed a few years ago. People run things they wrote for themselves: a movie log, a GTD inbox, a kanban board, a shopping list, a transit board, a budgeting tool, a language-learning app, a shop. Many say outright that a coding agent wrote most of it. runjake calls them “vibe-coded replacements for services that I formerly paid a subscription for.” Agingcoder: “Apps I write for myself using coding agents that match exactly what I need.” The cost of a personal app has dropped to an afternoon, and the $5 box is where those afternoons go to live.

3. The front door: VPNs, proxies, tunnels (about 40 for proxies and tunnels, 32 Tailscale, 26 WireGuard)

This is the plumbing that makes the VPS-plus-home-machine pattern work. The split is roughly:

• Tailscale, used as a private mesh so a laptop, a phone and a home server can see each other without any port being open. About half the Tailscale users also run it as an exit node for travel.
• WireGuard, run by hand on the VPS as a bounce host. Its fans like that the whole config is “a single short text file with keys” (drnick1). A few run Headscale or Netbird instead, to keep the control plane their own.
• A reverse proxy on the VPS (Caddy most often, then nginx and Traefik) that forwards to services at home over the VPN. Cloudflare Tunnels and Pangolin do the same job for people who do not want a VPN at all.

The reason this matters comes up again and again: residential connections are behind carrier-grade NAT or have no stable address, and a $5 box is the cheapest static IP on the market. erdaquin calls the VPS a “sacrificial server” while “my home servers do all the heavy lifting.”

A separate, smaller group runs a VPN for a different reason: to reach the internet from inside a censored network, or to give friends in such countries an exit. andOlga: “Exit node for friends in countries with internet censorship.” gediz says the VPN alone saves a friend group about $50 a month in commercial VPN subscriptions.

4. Git hosting (about 35)

Forgejo and Gitea lead, with a surprising number of people on gitolite, Fossil or plain bare repositories over SSH. The motive is split between convenience and insurance. grugdev42: “Mirror my Github repos (in case GH goes down or closes my account).” Memory is the constraint: Gitea idles at about 150 MB, GitLab ran out of memory at 6 GB (forsalebypwner), and gitolite fits in 1 GB.

5. AI agents on their own machine (about 30)

The newest category and already a large one. People run Claude Code, Codex, Hermes and similar agents on a VPS so the agent has a machine that is not their laptop. weberer: “now it gets its own machine where it can’t touch my keys.” Others run it to code from a phone (mceleri), to keep long-running agents alive, or to spin up one VPS per project. A smaller group runs inference at home with Ollama or llama.cpp on a used GPU, and only the chat interface on the VPS. Note that nearly everyone says $5 is not enough for this; $10 to $25 a month, or a dedicated Hetzner box, is the usual figure.

6. Media and photos (Jellyfin about 19, torrents about 17, Immich about 16)

Jellyfin is the media server, almost always on the home machine rather than the VPS, because transcoding wants a GPU and a $5 plan has neither the disk nor the chip. A noticeable sub-genre is people buying DVDs at thrift stores for a dollar each and ripping them (jotato has about 300). Immich replaces Google Photos, and the reason is stated plainly by ehe78qhe: “personal photos you don’t want to trust to strange tech companies.” The torrent crowd mostly runs a seedbox to keep private-tracker ratios up, with Syncthing pulling finished files home. Nextcloud, which would have topped this list a few years ago, gets only about five mentions, nearly all of them lukewarm.

7. Email (about 22)

More people self-host email than the folklore would suggest, and most of them say it has been quiet. Lammy has had the same IP for fifteen years; spc476 has hosted their own since 1999; dare944: “I can go months without even thinking about it.” The main non-obvious use is per-signup aliases: give every company its own address, and when bestbuy@yourdomain starts getting mail from strangers you know who leaked it (spl757). Three commenters push back that deliverability is never guaranteed, and nobody in the thread claims it is.

8. Backups (about 19)

restic, Borg and kopia to Backblaze B2, a Hetzner storage box, Cloudflare R2 or S3 Glacier, usually on cron. The thread’s firmest piece of advice is here: RAID is not a backup, keep an encrypted copy somewhere else, and test the restore. CountGeek had an agent configure kopia and then verified a restore before trusting it, which is the right order.

9. Game servers (about 20)

Minecraft for kids or for the once-a-year two-week phase, TeamSpeak, Factorio, Valheim, Counter-Strike 1.6. The clever version is ro_bit’s: the VPS only holds the IP, and when someone connects it provisions an AWS machine for Minecraft and tears it down afterward, which “saved me hundreds of dollars” over running it all the time.

10. The long tail

Each of these has roughly ten to fifteen people behind it:

• Monitoring: Uptime Kuma, Beszel, Zabbix, Grafana. The VPS checks whether home is reachable, which is the one job home cannot do for itself.
• Authoritative DNS for your own domains, sometimes as a secondary on another continent.
• Scrapers and cron jobs: apartment listings, transit data, price checks, a nightly ingest.
• Home Assistant, always on the home box, with the VPS as the MQTT broker or the tunnel in.
• RSS readers: Miniflux and FreshRSS, “instead of letting the algorithm decide” (deniska).
• File sharing in place of WeTransfer: CopyParty, SFTPGo, Pingvin, PairDrop.
• Passwords: Vaultwarden, sometimes for the whole family.
• Notes and bookmarks: Linkding, Outline, Trilium, Wallabag, Joplin sync.
• IRC: a client in tmux or screen that never disconnects, which is the oldest use of a VPS in the thread.
• Syncthing relays, Pi-hole, Matrix and XMPP servers, Audiobookshelf, Navidrome, Paperless, Actual Budget, ntfy for push notifications.

Why people say it is worth it

The arguments, in order of how often they appear:

• Independence and privacy. Not trusting photo services, not trusting a platform that can close an account, not wanting ISP or cloud visibility. This is the single most common reason, from about thirty commenters.
• AI agents made the sysadmin part cheap. About twenty-five people say some version of “I had an agent write the deploy script.” This is new and it changes who self-hosts.
• A public IP for the home machine. The VPS is the cheapest fixed address and the safest place to expose something.
• It costs nothing worth discussing. $60 a year, $20 a year on Racknerd, $10 a year on a LowEndBox deal, free on Oracle’s tier. One commenter from a poorer country points out that $5 is not nothing everywhere.
• It stays up when the house does not. “It’s going to stay up even if my house catches fire” (test6554).
• It is low maintenance if you keep it simple: unattended upgrades, one Caddy, docker compose, no JavaScript.
• It replaces subscriptions: Plex for streaming, a VPN for a VPN service, Linkding for Pinboard.
• It is fun, and it is where you learn.

The dissenters are fewer but consistent. Static sites can live on free hosts (GitHub Pages, Cloudflare Pages). Cheap providers rug-pull on renewal, and Oracle’s free tier deletes idle instances. Self-hosted email is a risk you choose. A datacenter IP gets you captchas everywhere. And one person argues the maintenance and security burden simply is not worth it, which three others immediately contest.

Where it runs

Providers named most: Hetzner (the favorite, for both VPS and storage boxes), Oracle’s always-free ARM tier (popular and anxiously held), DigitalOcean, Racknerd, Linode, and the LowEndBox and LowEndTalk deal boards. Cloudflare’s tunnels and R2 come up as the free glue. Prices stated range from 10 cents a month (TierHive, 128 MB) to $300 a month for a remote dev workstation, with $5 and $10 a year deals mentioned more than once.

At home: Raspberry Pis, old desktops and laptops, Intel N100 and N150 mini PCs (Beelink most often), Lenovo Tiny and NUCs, a Mac mini, and several people pointing out that a modern mini PC idles under five watts, which undercuts the old argument that a VPS is cheaper than the electricity.

The exotics

• A mushroom-spore shop on OpenBSD with no JavaScript and no cookies. The basket lives in the URL. Orders are written as public-key-encrypted JSON with no private key on the server; a laptop connects a few times a day to collect and delete them. Bank transfer only, because the products are “high risk” to payment processors (mycofunguy).
• A $20 honeypot on an old domain that was once hardcoded as a Stuxnet command server (bradly).
• A private DNS root with a custom root zone, “no reliance on ICANN,” and a personal version of the web encrypted with CurveCP instead of TLS (1vuio0pswjnm7).
• A subway arrival page with its own regression model, because the author lives two stops from a terminus and the official predictions only begin two or three minutes out (z2).
• An alternative interface for the kids’ Yoto players that adds an intercom, so “Come have breakfast!” can be broadcast upstairs without yelling (kidnoodle).
• A Berlin citizen’s-office appointment finder that pushed free slots over websockets with a sound alert. It is now obsolete because the city fixed the problem, and another commenter got their first appointment with it (nicbou).
• A cron job that switches on the coffee maker’s smart plug before the alarm, running on a twelve-year-old PC from a reuse center (PaulHoule).
• A website that counts the hours of daylight saved by daylight saving time. It is a static page containing the number 0 (nulbyte).
• A Matrix server for about ten users on a 128 MB, $15-a-year VPS (masfuerte). Someone else ran a 32 MB server for a while.
• A VPS whose job is to watch for availability of Hetzner’s $5 VPS and repost it (totetsu).
• A .US locality domain registrar that has been online continuously since 1994 (kraptv).
• Nightscout syncing a glucose monitor to a Pebble watch, set up in an hour with a coding agent, by a type-1 diabetic (droidjj).
• A kitchen info board on the TV, run by an Orange Pi, where the kids dictate game ideas by phone and Codex builds them on screen (csharpminor).
• A Raspberry Pi that pulls the day’s unread RSS, has an LLM summarize and group it, writes the digest to a notes app and exposes it through Tailscale Funnel so it can be read on a locked-down work laptop (mrngld).
• A second cheap box colocated in Luxembourg “for reasons which are legal in Luxembourg” (ivraatiems).
• A finger server (runnr_az), gopher and gemini and quote-of-the-day since 1999 (spc476), a “geographically strategic” Reticulum transport node (DeluluDon), and a TrackMania 2 server on a Pi Zero 2 once an Ethernet adapter was found for it (Venn1).
• A box of ancient single-board computers rescued from a closet, with Linux images built by an agent. One of them now exists solely to keep a tmux session alive (SyzygyRhythm).

What the thread adds up to

The $5 server has not changed much in a decade. It still serves a website, holds a static IP, and keeps an IRC client connected. What changed is who can run one, and what they put on it. The second-largest category in the thread is software that did not exist until its owner asked an agent for it, and the fifth-largest is the agent itself. The old questions, whether a VPS beats a mini PC at home, whether to trust a $10-a-year provider, whether to host your own email, are all still argued. The answer to the original question, though, is close to unanimous: yes, and the thing worth keeping online is the one you made.