I see a lot of incredible homelab setups here, but I wanted to share my minimalist approach for anyone just getting started.
Hardware: Single 2GB RAM VPS (Hetzner Cloud, CX22)
Services running:
- Uptime Monitor — checks my sites every 60s, alerts via webhook
- SSL Certificate Checker — warns me 30 days before expiry
- Website Change Detector — monitors competitor pages and docs for changes
- API Toolkit — JSON formatter, JWT decoder, UUID generator, hash tools
- QR Code Generator — unlimited, no watermarks
- Static site hosting — docs and guides via Nginx
Stack:
- Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
- Nginx (reverse proxy + static serving)
- Node.js services managed by PM2
- UFW + fail2ban for security
- Let's Encrypt SSL
Resource usage:
- RAM: ~400MB used / 2GB total
- CPU: basically idle (spikes during monitoring checks)
- Disk: ~3GB used
- Bandwidth: negligible
The whole thing has been running stable for weeks. PM2 handles auto-restarts if anything crashes. Total downtime: 0 minutes.
Biggest lesson: You don't need Kubernetes, Docker, or a rack of hardware to self-host useful tools. A single cheap VPS with PM2 and Nginx gets you surprisingly far.
Anyone else running a minimal setup? What's your favorite lightweight service to self-host?
I'm an old sysadmin, so i don't mind heavyweight lol. my favorite service to self-host is NextCloud. I have used it to replace all cloud storage, MS Office 365 (as it has a native web office editor), Spotify (hosting all my music and streaming with subsonic), a great cook book app that downloads and stores just recipes from the web (sans all the pages of worthless info), an RSS news reader with my favorite sources, password manager along with clients and extensions for all of my devices, a unified web mail client for all of my email, and more.
Edit: Also, i have T-Mobile for home internet which uses CGNAT, and I host it at home, so I use tailscale on everything to access it.