← Back to Blog

How to Set Up a VPS for a Small Business (2026)

Published May 4, 2026  ·  7 min read  ·  Galaxy Cloud Solutions

A $10 or $20 VPS can replace several SaaS subscriptions that small businesses pay for every month. File storage, team chat, project management, email — all of it can run on your own server. Here is how to think about it and what to actually set up.

⚡ VPS plans from $5/mo — Use code LAUNCH2026 for 50% off

What a Small Business Actually Needs

Most small businesses pay for some combination of these every month:

• Website hosting — $10 to $50/mo
• File storage and sharing (Dropbox, Google Drive) — $10 to $25/mo
• Team chat (Slack) — $7.25 per user per month
• Password manager (1Password, Bitwarden) — $3 to $8 per user per month
• Uptime monitoring — $20 to $50/mo

A single $20/mo VPS can handle all of that. The setup takes a few hours. After that it just runs.

Start With Your Website

The first thing to move to a VPS is your website. Install a LEMP stack (Nginx + MySQL + PHP) and run WordPress, or whatever your site uses. If you are on Galaxy Cloud Solutions, the one-click installer in your dashboard does this in about two minutes.

Once your site is on a VPS, you control it completely. No more shared hosting throttling, no more surprise renewal price increases, no more calling support to get a PHP version changed.

Replace Dropbox With Nextcloud

Nextcloud is an open-source file sync and share platform. It works like Dropbox but you run it yourself. Desktop and mobile apps sync your files automatically. You can share folders with clients, set permissions, and access everything from a browser.

The one-click Nextcloud installer on Galaxy Cloud Solutions sets it up in about five minutes. For a team of five that is paying $15/mo for Dropbox, self-hosting saves $180 a year.

Replace Slack With Mattermost

Slack charges $7.25 per user per month and limits your message history on the free plan. Mattermost is an open-source team chat platform that looks and works like Slack. You run it on your VPS, keep full message history, and pay nothing per seat.

For a team of five, that is $435 a year back in your pocket. One-click installer available on the dashboard.

Replace 1Password With Vaultwarden

Vaultwarden is a self-hosted Bitwarden-compatible password manager. The official Bitwarden apps — browser extensions, mobile apps, desktop apps — all work with it. You run the server yourself, so your passwords never leave your infrastructure.

It runs in Docker and uses almost no resources. Install it alongside your other tools on the same VPS.

Run Your Own Uptime Monitor

Uptime Kuma is a self-hosted uptime monitoring tool. Point it at your website, your API, your email server — whatever you want to monitor. It sends alerts via email, Slack, Discord, or webhooks when something goes down.

Paid uptime monitoring services charge $20 to $50 a month for what Uptime Kuma does for free on your VPS.

What Plan Do You Need?

Use Case	Recommended Plan	Price
Website only	Nebula 1 (1GB RAM)	$5/mo
Website + Nextcloud or Mattermost	Nebula 2 (2GB RAM)	$10/mo
Full stack (website + Nextcloud + Mattermost + monitoring)	Galaxy 1 (4GB RAM)	$20/mo

The Bottom Line

A small business running five SaaS tools can easily spend $100 to $200 a month. A $20 VPS with a few hours of setup replaces most of that. The tools are mature, the one-click installers make setup fast, and once it is running you mostly forget about it.

The main reason businesses do not do this is that nobody told them it was this straightforward.