Self-Hosting

r/selfhosted had a thread this January that stuck with me: “Girlfriend approved homeserver setup” — a photo of a clean desk, a tiny black box tucked behind a monitor, and a title that got 1,313 upvotes. The top comment: “She noticed when Plex went down. That’s when I knew it was real.” That thread resonated because it captures the actual bar for a family home server. Not benchmark scores or rack-mounted gear — the bar is does anyone in the house notice it exists, and if they do, is it because something broke or because something useful happened? ...

Three years ago I was the guy who paid for Google One, Dropbox Pro, and YouTube Premium — and never questioned whether there was another way. The idea of running my own server sounded like something sysadmins did in windowless rooms, not something a frontend developer with a spare Raspberry Pi should even attempt. February 2024, around 11 PM, an ad played before a YouTube video I’d already watched five times. Something snapped. I typed “block ads at network level” into Google, and 45 minutes later I was staring at a Pi-hole admin dashboard showing 23% of my home traffic was tracking and ad domains. That was Aha! Moment #1. ...

How to Deploy Hermes Agent on Your Own VPS: Step-by-Step Guide (2026) TL;DR: Deploy Hermes Agent on a $6/mo VPS — open-source AI agent with 185k+ GitHub stars, persistent memory, and Kanban task scheduling. Own your automation stack with no lock-in and no data leaving your server. Why Self-Host Hermes Agent? Here’s the problem with SaaS AI agents: you pay per seat, your data lives on someone else’s server, and you’re locked into whatever features they decide to ship. Self-hosting Hermes Agent flips that — one VPS, unlimited users in your team, full control over which models you use, and your conversation history stays on hardware you control. ...

Look, LLMs are great at generating text but terrible at remembering what you told them five minutes ago. So every session starts from scratch. And you repeat your preferences, your project context, your API keys — yet the model still drifts off-topic by turn 15. So most “AI memory” tools handle this by keeping everything in RAM or shipping your data to a cloud API. But neither scales well when you’re running multi-session agent workflows. ...