Many people stumble across virtual private server (VPS) hosting and think, “What am I going to do with that?” The budget-oriented might be thinking more along the lines of, “How am I going to recoup my costs from that?” Even others might be angling for profit.
Now, profiting from your VPS isn’t exactly my specialty. You might want to take a class at your nearest business school for that, or one of the many startup ideas threads that pop up on Hacker News now and then. What I can do is tell you about easily breaking even on your VPS investment. Maybe you’ll even get more out of it than you put in.
You’ll need an SSD Nodes VPS to start. “Why SSD Nodes?” you might ask. Well, our 16GB RAM plan—a fully-fledged KVM platform on top of incredible hardware, mind you—comes in at $[price]/mo. With other providers, that might cost you $60 or $80/mo. That positive ROI doesn’t seem so farfetched now, does it?
The core idea: self-hosting
Oh, do we love self-hosting around here. The ability to host powerful web apps, for free, is incredibly empowering and freeing. Not only do you take control of your data, but you can save yourself some serious cash, too.
Need a primer on what self-hosting is? Check out our post: What the Heck is Self-Hosting? A Guide to ‘Owning’ Your Webapps.
The goal is to find SaaS web apps that many developers pay for and replace them with free, self-hosted alternatives. Once we start tallying up the return on replacing each paid app with a powerful free one, we can see just how quickly self-hosting can push us from being a few bucks in the red to entirely in the black.
GitHub — $7/mo
GitHub has to be the most commonly used SaaS application for developers. Most developers also want private repositories, mainly if they’re working on closed source software, whether a side project, contract work, or for the company they’re building.
The free GitHub account doesn’t allow private repositories, so many are paying at least $7/mo for that privilege, if not more.
Instead, you could self-host one of the popular, free, self-hosted alternatives, such as Gitea or GitLab. You can easily install Gitea via a single binary or a simple docker-compose.yml
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