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Best VPS for Self-Hosting in 2026

Published May 3, 2026  ·  8 min read  ·  Galaxy Cloud Solutions

Running your own Nextcloud, Bitwarden, Plex, or Gitea used to mean a server under your desk and a dynamic IP you were constantly fighting. A cheap VPS solves both problems — static IP, real uptime, and full root access, usually for less than the electricity cost of running idle hardware at home 24/7.

The mistake most people make is RAM planning. Some of these apps are genuinely tiny. Others look small and quietly eat memory once you actually use them. Here is what things actually need.

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RAM by App

App	Minimum	Comfortable	Notes
Vaultwarden	128MB	256MB	Rust rewrite of Bitwarden — absurdly lightweight
Uptime Kuma	256MB	512MB	Monitoring dashboard, very low overhead
Gitea	256MB	512MB	Heavier with large repos and CI pipelines
Mealie	256MB	512MB	Recipe manager, PostgreSQL backend
Home Assistant	512MB	1GB	More integrations means more memory used
Nextcloud (personal)	512MB	1–2GB	Scales with active users and sync clients
Immich	1GB	2GB	ML features eat memory fast
Jellyfin / Plex (direct play)	512MB–1GB	1–2GB	CPU barely involved when no transcoding
Jellyfin / Plex (transcoding)	2GB	4GB+	One 1080p software transcode needs roughly one full CPU core

Matching Apps to Plans

Nebula 1 — $5/mo (1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, 20GB SSD)

Pick one lightweight service and run it well. Vaultwarden is the obvious choice — runs on almost nothing, full Bitwarden-compatible API, works with every Bitwarden client. Uptime Kuma also lives comfortably here. Trying to stack multiple Docker containers on 1GB gets frustrating fast once you factor in OS and Docker overhead.

Nebula 2 — $10/mo (2 vCPU, 2GB RAM, 40GB SSD)

The sweet spot for most personal setups. Nextcloud for file sync, Home Assistant, or Immich all run well here. Enough headroom to run two or three lighter apps alongside each other without watching memory constantly.

Galaxy 1 — $20/mo (4 vCPU, 4GB RAM, 80GB SSD)

Where you want to be if Jellyfin or Plex is doing software transcoding, or you are running a collection of services for a small group of people. The extra CPU headroom matters a lot for media servers converting video in real time.

The Storage Reality for Media Servers

A 1080p movie is 4–20GB depending on how it was encoded. A TV season runs 20–60GB. VPS storage is fast SSD but it tops out at 320GB on the Supernova plan. For a modest personal collection that is fine. For a large library, look at mounting external object storage or keeping files on a home NAS and running just the server software on the VPS.

VPS vs. Home Server

Home server wins on cost per gigabyte and local network speed. VPS wins on reliability, static IP, no port forwarding headaches, and not caring what happens when your ISP has an outage. For anything that needs to be accessible from the internet without complexity, the VPS is usually the easier choice.