A VPS in the £10 to £15 a month range gets you something specific: 4 CPU cores, 8GB of RAM, and 80 to 160GB of SSD storage, depending on provider. That is Hetzner's CX32, OVHcloud's equivalent tier, or Contabo's mid-range plan. It is a meaningful step up from the entry-level £4 to £8 boxes, and the jump in capability is bigger than the jump in price suggests.
At this budget you are no longer choosing one tool and living with it. You have enough headroom to run a genuinely useful stack side by side, all on the same server, all under your own control. This post lists what fits, roughly how much each service costs you in RAM, and what a sensible combined stack looks like in practice.
Figures in this post are illustrative, not a spec to follow blindly. See our disclaimer for how to treat blog content like this.
Every tool below is free and open source. No licence fees, no per-seat pricing, no feature paywalls. You are only ever paying for the server itself.
Passwords
Vaultwarden is a lightweight, Rust-based implementation of the Bitwarden server API. It gives you and your team a shared, encrypted password vault with browser extensions and mobile apps that work exactly like the real Bitwarden. Runs comfortably in under 100MB of RAM.
Team communication
Mattermost replaces Slack or Microsoft Teams. Channels, threads, direct messages, file sharing, and a searchable history that lives on your server rather than someone else's. Budget 300 to 500MB of RAM for a small team.
File storage and office documents
Nextcloud replaces Google Drive or Dropbox, and pairing it with Collabora Online or OnlyOffice gives you real-time collaborative document, spreadsheet, and presentation editing in the browser. This is one of the heavier services on the list, expect 500MB to 1GB of RAM once the office suite is included.
Git hosting and CI
Forgejo or Gitea give you repositories, issues, pull requests, and basic CI runners, all in a binary that idles around 150MB of RAM. GitLab is the more feature-complete option here, but it wants 4GB of RAM on its own, which makes it a poor fit if you intend to run anything else alongside it at this tier.
Website and blogging
WordPress remains the most practical choice for a public-facing site, with a plugin ecosystem that covers e-commerce, membership, forms, and SEO without writing a line of code. Modest RAM use, 150 to 300MB depending on traffic and plugins.
Notes and knowledge base
Trilium Notes is a hierarchical, self-hosted note-taking application built for people who accumulate a lot of structured information over time. Rich text, code blocks, scripting, and end-to-end encryption. Under 100MB of RAM.
Read-it-later
Wallabag saves articles and web pages stripped of trackers and ads, with tagging and full-text search. A clean replacement for Pocket or Instapaper. Around 100MB of RAM.
RSS reader
Miniflux is a deliberately minimal, fast RSS aggregator with almost no configuration surface. If you want something closer to a traditional RSS reader with folders and sharing, FreshRSS is the alternative. Both sit under 100MB of RAM.
Monitoring and status pages
Grafana paired with Prometheus gives you real dashboards and alerting across your entire stack, though the combination wants close to 1GB of RAM once you are scraping several services. If you just want a public status page showing uptime for your services, Uptime Kuma does that job in under 100MB.
Privacy-respecting analytics
Plausible or Umami give you visitor counts, referrers, and page views for your website without cookies, without tracking individuals, and without sending any of it to Google. Both are light, 150 to 250MB of RAM.
Workflow automation
n8n replaces Zapier or Make for connecting services together, triggering actions on schedules or webhooks, and automating the small repetitive tasks that otherwise eat an afternoon. Around 200MB of RAM at rest.
VPN and remote access
WireGuard gives you a fast, modern VPN for securely reaching your home network or internal services from anywhere. If you need to connect multiple devices into one mesh network without manual key management, Headscale (a self-hosted Tailscale control server) sits on top of it. Both are negligible on RAM.
Bookmarks
Linkding is a minimal, tag-based bookmark manager with a browser extension, useful as a shared reference library for a small team. Well under 100MB of RAM.
Document collaboration for technical writing
Overleaf Community Edition is worth a mention if you or your team write in LaTeX regularly, a collaborative editor for technical reports and papers where precise typesetting matters. It is resource-hungry compared to everything else on this list, so it competes directly with Nextcloud and Grafana for your RAM budget rather than sitting alongside them for free.
A realistic combined stack
You cannot run all fourteen of the above at once on 8GB of RAM, not comfortably. But you do not need to. Here is a stack that fits with room to spare, covering the tools most small businesses and freelancers actually reach for:
- Vaultwarden (passwords)
- Mattermost (team chat)
- Forgejo (git hosting)
- WordPress (website)
- Trilium Notes (knowledge base)
- Miniflux (RSS)
- Uptime Kuma (status page)
- Plausible or Umami (analytics)
That combination sits comfortably under 2GB of RAM at idle, leaving the rest of your 8GB for traffic spikes, backups running in the background, and the database overhead each service brings with it. Swap Nextcloud in for Trilium if file storage matters more to you than notes, or add n8n if automation is your priority. The point is that this tier of VPS gives you real choice, not a single slot to fill.
What this does not include
Two categories are deliberately absent from this list. Email is not here, because self-hosting mail servers well enough to avoid landing in spam folders is a specialist job in its own right, and most small operations are better served by a proper transactional email provider even in an otherwise fully self-hosted setup. GitLab is mentioned but not recommended at this tier, because its RAM appetite alone would crowd out almost everything else on this list.
Backups still apply
Running eight services instead of one does not change the rules. You still need automated snapshots of the whole server, application-level backups for each database, and an offsite copy stored somewhere a single incident cannot reach. If anything, more services running means more things worth losing, so this is not the place to cut corners to make room in the budget.
Where to start
Do not install all eight services in one afternoon. Pick the two or three that replace something you are currently paying for, get them running properly, hardened, and backed up, then add the rest over the following weeks as you get comfortable with the server. A stack built up gradually, with each piece properly understood, is worth far more than the same stack deployed in a single rushed session and half forgotten.
Every tool mentioned in this post, along with everything else we recommend across the site, is listed with a short description in our software directory.
If you want help deciding which of these fit your situation, sizing the right VPS, and getting everything installed and hardened properly, that is exactly what we do at Techster Consulting. We advise, you implement, and you end up owning infrastructure you actually understand.