Most VPS conversations start and end with "where do I put my website". That undersells what a spare box with a public IP address and a few gigabytes of RAM is actually good for. Once you own a general-purpose Linux server, a lot of things that currently cost you a monthly subscription, or hand your data to an American company by default, become something you can just run yourself.
We covered the budget and resource side of this in every open source service you can run for £10 to £15 a month. This post is the other half of that conversation: less about what fits on the server, more about what you might actually want to point it at.
You do not need all of these. Pick one or two that replace something you are already paying for or already worried about, and start there.
Your own password vault
Vaultwarden deserves a mention even though we have covered it before, because it is the one item on this list almost everyone benefits from. A self-hosted, Bitwarden-compatible password vault with the usual browser extensions and mobile apps, minus the third party holding the encrypted blob. Light on resources, easy to justify first.
A personal cloud drive
Nextcloud is the closest thing to a straight swap for Google Drive or Dropbox. Desktop and mobile sync clients, file versioning, shared folders, calendar and contacts if you want them too. The trade-off is that you become responsible for the storage and the backups that Google was quietly handling before, which is worth going in with your eyes open about.
An internet radio station built from your own music
AzuraCast turns a folder of MP3s or FLACs you actually own into a proper internet radio station, complete with playlists, scheduling, and a stream URL that plays in a browser or any app that understands internet radio. It behaves like a real station rather than an on-demand jukebox, which is a genuinely different listening experience to build for friends, family, or just yourself. Keep it to music you have the rights to distribute; this is a personal station, not a way to rebroadcast someone else's catalogue.
On-demand streaming of that same library
If a linear station is not what you are after, Navidrome points at the same folder of music and gives you a Spotify-style app instead, with search, playlists, and the ability to jump straight to a track. Worth running alongside AzuraCast rather than instead of it; they serve different moods from one library.
A personal photo library
Immich replaces Google Photos with automatic backup from your phone, face grouping, and a timeline view that feels close to what you are used to. Photos tend to be the one thing on a server that is genuinely irreplaceable, so this is a case where the backup strategy matters more than the software choice. Do not treat the VPS itself as the only copy.
A private media server for your own video collection
Jellyfin organises and streams video you already have the rights to, home videos, personal recordings, or discs you own and have ripped for your own use. It is not a way around paying for the streaming services you actually use; it is somewhere to put the video that has nowhere else to live.
A search engine that is not building a profile on you
SearXNG aggregates results from other search engines without logging your queries or attaching them to an identity. It will not out-rank Google's relevance on every query, but for a lot of day to day searching it is close enough, and the privacy trade is usually worth it.
Voice chat that does not run through Discord
Mumble gives a small group, a gaming crew, a family, a project team, low-latency voice chat on infrastructure nobody else controls. No accounts to create, no platform to moderate on someone else's terms.
A game server for a group of friends
Minecraft, Valheim, Terraria, and plenty of others run comfortably on a mid-tier VPS for a small group. The honest caveat here is RAM usage: these servers are often idle for most of the week and then busy for a few hours at a weekend, so decide upfront whether you want it running permanently or scheduled to start and stop, rather than discovering the cost difference after a few months.
A quiet way into your home network
A VPS running WireGuard as a relay, paired with a reverse proxy, gives you a way to reach a home NAS, a printer, or a Home Assistant instance from outside your house without opening ports on your home router. The VPS becomes the front door; your home network stays behind it.
An offsite backup destination
Whatever else ends up on the VPS, it can also just be a quiet backup target. Pointing something like Restic or BorgBackup at it from a home NAS or laptop gives you a genuine offsite copy, separate from whatever cloud backup you already have, which is exactly the kind of redundancy a proper backup strategy is supposed to have.
Treat the specifics above as a starting point, not a spec to follow blindly. See our disclaimer for how to read blog content like this.
Start with one, not all eleven
The list above is meant to spark ideas, not to become a weekend project list. Every service you add is one more thing that needs updates, monitoring, and its own place in your backup plan. Pick the one that solves something you are currently annoyed about, get it running and hardened properly, and let the rest wait.
Everything mentioned here, and everything else we recommend across the site, is listed with a short description in our software directory.
If you want help working out which of these actually fit your situation, and getting the one you pick installed and hardened properly, that is what we do at Techster Consulting. We advise on the setup, you implement it on your own server, and you end up owning something you understand rather than renting something you don't.