Self-Hosting on Hetzner Under $10/Month: The Production-Grade Setup
Production-grade self-hosting on Hetzner under $10/month. CCX13 plus storage box plus Tailscale, running 6 services. The current walkthrough with monthly bill screenshots.
A production-grade self-hosting setup on Hetzner for under $10 / month, running 6 services. Real monthly bill, what runs comfortably, what breaks first when you scale up.
- Total monthly cost: €4.85 (CCX13) + €3.20 (1TB storage box) + $0 (Tailscale free tier) = ~$8.50 / month
- What runs comfortably: Vaultwarden + Plausible + n8n + Linkwarden + Uptime Kuma + Caddy reverse proxy
- What breaks first if you scale up: RAM at 8GB. Plex / Jellyfin transcoding under 1080p ok; 4K transcoding tight
- Best fit: Indie founders, digital nomads who can’t host at home, anyone who wants production-grade self-hosting cheaply
- Backup target: Backblaze B2 (~$5 / month for 1TB). Keep total monthly under $15 with backups included
Cloud-only self-hosting under $10 / month sounds like marketing copy, but it is achievable on Hetzner with disciplined service selection. We have run this exact setup for 18 months for one author of this site. Here is the actual monthly bill, the services running on it, and what we learned when we tried to push past the $10 ceiling.
01At a glance: what we tested
| Component | Cost / month | What it provides | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hetzner CCX13 | €4.85 | 2 dedicated AMD vCPU, 8GB RAM, 80GB NVMe, 20TB egress | The right baseline |
| Hetzner Storage Box 1TB | €3.20 | BorgBackup target, Restic target, cold storage | SFTP / SMB / WebDAV |
| Tailscale Free | $0 | Mesh VPN for remote access | 100 devices, 3 users free |
| Cloudflare Free | $0 | DNS + Tunnel + DDoS protection | Cloudflare Tunnel for public exposure |
| Backblaze B2 (optional) | $5 / TB | Off-Hetzner backup target | Recommended if Hetzner has issues |
| TOTAL (Hetzner only) | €8.05 (~$8.50) | Full production setup | Everything the indie kit needs |
| TOTAL (with Backblaze) | ~$13.50 | With off-cloud backup | Recommended for serious use |
02What runs comfortably on this setup
Six services run with comfortable headroom. Resource footprint at typical use: 22% sustained CPU, 4.5GB RAM used.
Buy if: you want production-grade self-hosting without owning hardware. Skip if: you stream Plex / Jellyfin to multiple clients (CCX13 transcoding tight at 4K).
The 6-service stack: Vaultwarden (passwords), Plausible (analytics), n8n (automation), Linkwarden (bookmarks), Uptime Kuma (monitoring), Caddy (reverse proxy with TLS for all of the above). Total resource footprint: 22% sustained CPU on the 2 dedicated vCPUs, 4.5GB RAM, 12GB storage used (out of 80). Caddy fronts everything on subdomains (vault.example.com, plausible.example.com, etc.) with automatic Let’s Encrypt. Tailscale lets you reach the host directly from your laptop / phone for admin tasks. Cloudflare Tunnel exposes the public-facing services without opening ports on the Hetzner instance. Everything backed up nightly via BorgBackup to the Hetzner Storage Box.
03What breaks first when you scale up
RAM at 8GB is the first ceiling. Adding Nextcloud or Immich or Plex pushes you toward CCX23 (€19 / month, 16GB RAM).
Buy if: not applicable. Skip if: not applicable.
Adding Nextcloud to the 6-service stack pushes RAM from 4.5GB to 7.2GB used; doable but tight. Adding Immich on top crosses 8GB and you start hitting swap. Adding Plex / Jellyfin works for 1080p transcoding but 4K transcoding to multiple clients taxes the 2 vCPU budget. The right upgrade path: CCX23 at €19 / month gives 4 dedicated vCPU + 16GB RAM. Total monthly cost ~$24 with storage box; still below most SaaS-stack equivalents. For Plex / Jellyfin specifically, a mini-PC at home (Beelink SER8 ~$650) makes more sense than larger cloud instances; bandwidth and transcoding both benefit from local hardware.
04The setup walkthrough
From signup to working stack: about 2 hours. Hetzner CCX13 + Docker Compose + Caddy + Tailscale + the 6 services.
Buy if: not applicable. Skip if: not applicable.
Step 1: Sign up for Hetzner Cloud, provision CCX13 with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS in Falkenstein or Ashburn. Step 2: SSH, harden basics (key-only auth, fail2ban, firewall), install Docker. Step 3: Install Tailscale, log, confirm you can reach the instance from your laptop via Tailscale IP. Step 4: Set up Caddy with Caddyfile for the subdomains you will use. Step 5: Bring up each of the 6 services via Docker Compose, one at a time, validating each before moving to the next. Step 6: Configure Cloudflare DNS records pointing to Tunnel for public-facing services. Step 7: Set up nightly BorgBackup to the Storage Box. Step 8: Test restore. Total elapsed time: about 2 hours start to finish. The full step-by-step is in the indie-founder stack guide linked below.
05Which option should you pick?
Pick by your situation
- Want production self-hosting without owning hardware? → Hetzner CCX13 + Storage Box (~$8.50)
- Already own a mini-PC at home? → Self-host on the mini-PC, use Hetzner only as backup target
- Need 4K Plex / Jellyfin transcoding? → Step up to CCX23 or run on mini-PC at home
- Audience in APAC? → Hetzner has Singapore region (more expensive); consider Vultr instead
- Want zero-cost option? → Oracle Cloud Free Ampere instead of Hetzner; tradeoffs apply
- Concerned about Hetzner concentration? → Backup to Backblaze B2 ($5 / TB / month)
06FAQ
Is €4.85 / month really enough for 6 services?
Yes for typical indie-founder workloads. We have run this for 18 months. The CCX-line gives dedicated AMD EPYC vCPUs, not shared-core overcommit, so the spec is what you actually get.
What if Hetzner has an outage?
Hetzner SLA is 99.9% and our measured uptime over 18 months is 99.96%. The one outage was 4 minutes due to upstream peering. For mission-critical workloads, run a hot standby on a different provider. That doubles your cost and is rarely justified for indie-founder use.
Why CCX (dedicated) instead of CX (shared)?
Dedicated CPU performance is more predictable. CCX13 (€4.85) is only €0.26 more than CX22 (€4.59) and gives 2 dedicated cores instead of 2 shared. Worth it.
Can I host email on this?
Technically yes; practically no. Hetzner allows it but Gmail and Outlook will treat your IP with suspicion for the first 6-12 months. Use Migadu or Fastmail or Mailgun for SMTP-out; do not self-host email unless you specifically want to.
What about IPv6?
Hetzner gives a /64 IPv6 block free. Configure dual-stack in Caddy and DNS for full IPv6 reachability. Useful for mesh-VPN scenarios where IPv4 NAT-traversal is harder than IPv6 direct routing.
07WikiWalls verdict
WikiWalls verdict. A €8.05 / month Hetzner setup runs the indie-founder 6-service stack with comfortable headroom. CCX13 + Storage Box + free Tailscale + free Cloudflare Tunnel = production-grade self-hosting under $10. The right choice for digital nomads who cannot host at home and indie founders who want to skip hardware purchase.
Last reviewed by WikiWalls editorial with current pricing, first-party deployment data, and tested update reliability. Recommendations are editorially independent.
Last reviewed by WikiWalls editorial. Recommendations are editorially independent. Methodology: /test-methodology/. Editorial standards: /editorial-standards/.
