HostOrOwn

A home server or a rented VPS?

Work out what your self-hosted apps need, then compare buying a small server with renting one.

Pick the applications you want to run. We work out how much memory, CPU and storage they need, check that against a machine you own or are looking at, and put a number on owning it against renting a VPS for one, two and three years.

The calculators run in your browser. Every input is visible and editable, and nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Start here

• Stack builder: choose your applications, see the machine they need.
• Can I run it?: test a machine you already own or found in a listing.
• Buy versus rent: totals over three years and the month the two lines cross.
• Hardware value and VPS value: which options actually fit your stack.

What is behind the numbers

We track ten applications, six small machines and twelve VPS plans from four providers. Every requirement, specification and price is read from a vendor page or document that we fetch, hash and archive, and each figure on a page says which document it came from and when we retrieved it. The sources page lists all of them.

Some numbers cannot be sourced. Several projects publish no sizing figures at all, no vendor publishes idle power at the wall, and used hardware prices move too fast for us to stand behind one. Those figures are labelled as our estimate with the reasoning shown, or left blank for you to fill in. We would rather show a gap than invent a number.

The methodology page explains the model, what each label means, and what the calculators cannot tell you.

What this is not

There are no reviews here, no rankings paid for by a provider, and no claim that one answer suits everyone. Money is only part of the decision: a machine at home cannot monitor your own internet connection, and a rented machine cannot hold your Zigbee stick. The pages say so where it matters.