Self-Hosting Everything on a €6/Month VPS — What I Run and Why

10 April 2026 self-hostinginfrastructuredockerhetzner

My entire personal cloud — AI bots, analytics, automation, this website — runs on a single Hetzner VPS. €6 per month. Here’s exactly what’s running and how I set it up.

What the €6 buys you

A Hetzner CX22 gives you 2 vCPUs, 4GB RAM, 40GB SSD, and 20TB bandwidth. Based in Germany, so GDPR-compliant by default. For a single developer running personal infrastructure, this is genuinely more than enough.

My stack:

This website (Hugo + Nginx)
Tree AI (my personal AI agent, runs 24/7)
Trading signal bots (Telegram-based market analysis pipeline)
n8n (workflow automation, replaces Zapier/Make for me)
Umami (privacy-first analytics for this site)
Nginx Proxy Manager (reverse proxy with SSL, dead simple UI)
Pi-hole (DNS ad-blocking, tunneled via VPN)

Everything runs in Docker. Each service is a container. Nginx Proxy Manager handles SSL termination via Let’s Encrypt automatically.

The Docker setup

I keep a single docker-compose.yml for the whole stack with named networks for internal service communication. The key principle: nothing is exposed directly to the internet except ports 80 and 443. Everything else is internal.

services:
  nginx-proxy:
    image: jc21/nginx-proxy-manager:latest
    ports:
      - "80:80"
      - "443:443"
    volumes:
      - ./npm/data:/data
      - ./npm/letsencrypt:/etc/letsencrypt

  umami:
    image: ghcr.io/umami-software/umami:postgresql-latest
    environment:
      DATABASE_URL: postgresql://...
    networks:
      - internal

  n8n:
    image: n8nio/n8n
    networks:
      - internal
    volumes:
      - ./n8n_data:/home/node/.n8n

Why not just use SaaS?

Three reasons:

Cost. Zapier, Notion, analytics tools, AI APIs — it adds up. My €6 VPS replaces about €80/month in SaaS subscriptions.

Control. When Zapier changes pricing or breaks a workflow, I don’t care. My n8n instance keeps running. Same for analytics — I own my data.

Learning. Running real infrastructure teaches you things that no course does. You learn about networking, debugging, performance, security — all in one place.

The one thing I’d do differently

I’d set up automated backups from day one. I use a simple cron job that dumps Docker volumes to a separate location, but I added it after a scare. Don’t wait.

Is this for everyone?

No. If you need zero maintenance and don’t want to think about servers, use managed services. But if you’re technical and want to actually understand the systems you depend on — self-hosting a €6 VPS is one of the best decisions I’ve made.

The total investment: one weekend to set it up, maybe 30 minutes per month to maintain.