About HostOrOwn

HostOrOwn is an independent publication based in Greece. It helps readers understand the cost and the practical limits of running a small home server compared with renting a VPS. The publisher's personal details are kept off these pages; the editorial process and the evidence behind published claims are what readers should be able to inspect.

A useful comparison needs more than two headline prices. Hardware has an upfront cost and an uncertain useful life. A rented server has recurring charges and service limits. Both may need backups, additional storage, and time spent on maintenance. Different workloads can lead to different choices even when their estimated costs are similar.

Current scope

We track ten popular self-hosted applications, six small machines and twelve VPS plans from four providers. The calculators cover application sizing, whether a machine can run a given stack, and owning against renting over one, two and three years. Everything runs in your browser.

Requirements, specifications and prices are read from vendor pages and specification sheets that we fetch and archive with a content hash and a retrieval date. Several projects publish no sizing figures, no vendor publishes idle power at the wall, and used hardware prices are too volatile for us to stand behind one. Those gaps are filled with clearly labelled estimates that show their reasoning, or left blank for you to complete. We do not invent specifications to finish a table, and we do not claim to have measured equipment we have not used.

We publish no reviews and no benchmark results. A manufacturer's statement, an independent observation and our own estimate are always identified separately.

Affiliate links may help fund the publication. The affiliate disclosure explains what a referral means. Payment from a merchant cannot substitute for evidence about a product.

Start with the methodology for how we treat price dates, power assumptions and missing information, or with the sources page for the documents themselves.