Moving the home server to a VPS

📖 Context

In 2025, I've decided to reassess the software I self-host and by extension maintain. This led to the decision to move away from Nextcloud, among other things.

Nextcloud is a great piece of software but it took a lot of my mental energy to maintain in a working state, especially for several users who rely on in being up and running when they need it the most. It got better when I moved to the "all-in-one" setup, but still.

I also wanted to move most of my hosted software away from the server in my house because I realized that I don't like waking up to a server reporting that backups could not complete due to faulty disk sectors. Important services would move to a cloud server while storage hungry but non-critical services (like media consumption) could stay home. Also, it would free up valuable space under the TV 😁

💾 File storage

Nextcloud served among other things as backup for our photo library and I didn't want to pay a fortune in server storage, so I took the decision to move my personal "drive" to pCloud, along with my wife's. They have lifetime offers, store data in Europe, and I had already paid for a lifetime personal plan in 2018. I upgraded it to a family plan and I don't worry about storage anymore.

2TB is plenty for now, including the photo library. I'd like to find a solution for the iCloud shared library pictures though, because we have a bunch of pictures being uploaded twice.

I keep it synced to an S3 bucket with rclone because I feel safer having a backup plan in case pCloud suddenly goes out of business.

☁️ New setup

I rent a VPS at OVHcloud. It has 2 vCores, 4GB of RAM and 40GB of storage. Quite the downgrade from my 8 cores, 56GB RAM and 2TB SSD server at home but now at least I don't have to manage the hardware myself.

I also discovered the Web Cloud Database offer: for less than 8€ per month, you can order a MySQL, Redis, MariaDB or PostgreSQL host and create as many databases as you want provided that you stay in the 8GB of storage and 512MB of RAM.

Finally, I took the time to setup Tailscale to avoid exposing SSH and some web services to the world and It Just Works™.

The resources are scarcer on the VPS, especially the 2 vCores, but it forces me to be more mindful with what I host. And I can always throw more money at it and upgrade at the click of a button if I really need to.

💶 Speaking of money

The current setup at home has cost about 1500€ over the course of 4.5 years (~334€/year) and the SSDs are starting to show signs of weakness. I already replaced two, I don't want to do more. They're about 90-100€ apiece at current prices.

With the VPS, here's the cost breakdown (including 20% VAT in France):

• VPS: 13.56€/mo
• Automated backup option: 3.96€/mo
• MySQL: 7.908€/mo
• PostgreSQL: 7.908€/mo
• Total: 33.336€/mo or 400.032€/year

I could save some money - about 30€/year - by committing to the VPS for one or two years but I'm giving myself some time before doing that.

OVHcloud is my employer but we don't have insider discounts on products so you shouldn't have any surprises if you want to replicate this setup yourself 🙂

The MySQL DB is used only for three instances of Ghost (open source blog software). I'm looking at alternative solutions for the blogs. Removing MySQL would save me ~96€/year so the recurring cost would go even below the homemade setup.

📕 Conclusion

All in all I'm pretty happy with the move. It was mostly painless since I had most of my configuration handled by Ansible so there were few things I had to do manually. I still have some cleanup to do on the home server but I feel lighter already.

Yes it costs more for less resources, but it covers my needs. I can upgrade or move away easily, and it takes away tasks I don't want to handle anymore. I could bring the cost down a bit more with commitment, but for now I'm enjoying the freedom.

I'll probably sell the hardware I have at home and replace it with a mini PC and a single disk for media consumption, it should be more than enough.