Self-hosting
Answer
Self-hosting means running the services you depend on — file sync, password management, photos, notes — on infrastructure you control instead of a vendor’s. A Incognito VPS VECTOR plan at $14 per month runs Nextcloud, Vaultwarden and Immich together comfortably for a household.
| Scenario | Minimum |
|---|---|
| Vaultwarden alone | 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM |
| Nextcloud, 5 users | 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 100 GB+ |
| Immich (photos, ML) | 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 500 GB+ |
| Full stack | 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 140 GB |
The trade you are actually making
Self-hosting swaps a subscription for responsibility. You stop paying a vendor and start being the person who applies updates, watches disk usage and holds the backups. That is a real cost in attention, and anyone presenting self-hosting as strictly better is skipping the interesting part.
What you get is that your files, passwords and photos live somewhere that does not train on them, does not scan them, does not change its terms, and cannot close your account. For a lot of people that is worth an hour a month.
A stack that works
Nextcloud for files, calendar and contacts. Vaultwarden for passwords — it is the lightweight Bitwarden-compatible server and the official clients work against it unchanged. Immich for photos, with face and object recognition that runs locally. Docker Compose to hold it together and Caddy in front for automatic TLS.
Add Gitea if you write code, Miniflux for RSS, Paperless-ngx for documents, and Jellyfin if you have media. All of it fits on 8 GB with room left over.
- Nextcloud — files, calendar, contacts, office
- Vaultwarden — passwords, Bitwarden-client compatible
- Immich — photos with local ML, no cloud dependency
- Gitea / Forgejo — Git hosting
- Paperless-ngx — document archive with OCR
- Caddy — reverse proxy with automatic certificates
Back it up, or none of this counts
A self-hosted service with no backup is worse than the vendor you left, because the vendor at least had redundancy. Use restic or Borg to a storage server in a different jurisdiction, encrypted client-side, running nightly, and test the restore.
Our encrypted-snapshot add-on does the hypervisor-level half of this at $0.04/GB/month, but a file-level backup you control is still the thing that saves you when you delete something by hand.
Frequently asked questions
01 What can I self-host on a $14 server?
Nextcloud, Vaultwarden, Immich, Gitea and a reverse proxy, together, for a household. VECTOR gives 4 vCPU, 8 GB and 140 GB of NVMe, which carries that stack comfortably.
02 Is self-hosting hard?
The setup is a weekend with Docker Compose. The ongoing cost is roughly an hour a month for updates and checking backups. The failure mode is neglect, not complexity.
03 Which location for personal data?
Switzerland or Iceland. Both are outside EU judicial cooperation, and Switzerland adds the revised nFADP regime with criminal liability for unlawful disclosure.
04 How do I back up a self-hosted server?
restic or Borg to a storage server in a second jurisdiction, encrypted client-side, nightly, with a tested restore. Add hypervisor snapshots at $0.04/GB/month as a second layer.
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