8 Things to Self Host in 2025 That Will Actually Pay For Your VPS

Did you know that every month you delay self-hosting, you potentially lose another $67.98? All while tech companies profit from your personal data. Cut both losses and win back both your data and money with these 8 self-hosted alternatives. Things to self-host on a VPS

8 Things to Self Host in 2025 That Make Your VPS Free

Previously, I explained what self-hosting is, how it can benefit you, and how to do it. This article will go beyond that, putting real money into your pocket (or at least, saving you from paying 100s of dollars every year). Here are the 8 best self-hosted SaaS alternatives we’ll cover:

GitHub alternatives
cPanel alternatives
Slack alternatives
Dropbox alternatives
VPN services
Password Manager
Notes and Documentation
Analytics

These self-hosted SaaS alternatives will pay for your VPS and help you save an additional $815.76 per year. Wait… what? Where? How? This article will answer all your questions.

Prerequisites: Where to Self-host?

Popular VPS providers like DigitalOcean and Vultr work very well for self-hosting, but they drain your savings, which defeats the point of self-hosting in the first place. We self-host to save money, not waste it on overpriced servers. SSD Nodes stands out as the budget-friendly alternative that makes self-hosting actually profitable. "How exactly?" The numbers speak for themselves. Our 16GB RAM plan – a full-fledged KVM setup on top-notch hardware – costs just $22/month. Other providers charge you $80-$100/month for the same specs.

Yes, just $22/month, not hundreds. Suddenly that positive ROI doesn't seem so farfetched, right? Additionally, you might even find a hefty discount from time to time (but please keep this between us 😉), See our self-hosting optimized plans →

1) Self-hosted GitHub — (Save $4/mo)

GitHub remains THE go-to SaaS for developers in 2025. Most development teams pay for GitHub Team at $4/month per user to get advanced features. The Team plan includes essential collaboration tools that many projects require, like protected branches, code owners functionality, and pages and wiki. Instead, you could self-host one of the excellent free alternatives like Gitea or GitLab. Gitea installs super easily via a single binary or a simple docker-compose.yml file. Both Gitea and GitLab have come a long way since their early days. Gitea is now incredibly lightweight yet packed with features, while GitLab has evolved into a complete DevSecOps platform with CI/CD, issue tracking, and more. These self-hosted options often run faster than their cloud counterparts since you're not sharing resources with thousands of other users. In 2025, GitLab has added even more features that make it competitive with GitHub, including improved merge request handling, better code review tools, and enhanced security scanning. Gitea has maintained its lightweight approach while allowing for incredible third-party integrations that simply makes it awesome-gitea.

Investment returned: $4/mo Total: $4/mo

That's 20% of your SSD Nodes bill covered already! Let's keep going.

2) Self-hosted cPanel — $32.99/mo

cPanel pricing and self-hosted alternatives

Not everyone pays for cPanel, but if you do, you know it takes a pretty big bite out of your budget every month. In 2025, cPanel's basic ADMIN plan starts at $32.99/mo, allowing you to manage up to 5 accounts. The good news? Plenty of free cPanel alternatives exist in 2025. Webmin is still the crowd favorite among our users, hitting that sweet spot between power and ease-of-use. Webmin installation couldn't be simpler, in fact, we have several full step-by-step tutorials to help you install and secure Webmin in minutes:

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