What to self-host on your first VPS
You've got a fresh VPS and a blank terminal. Now what? These are the apps I'd put on a first server, roughly in the order I'd install them. All of them run in Docker behind Caddy, and all of them fit on a small VPS together.
1. Uptime Kuma
A status page and monitor for everything else you run. It pings your sites and sends you a message on Telegram, email, Discord or a dozen other services when something goes down. Install it first, so you hear about problems with everything you add later.
2. Vaultwarden
Your own Bitwarden-compatible password manager. Tiny, fast, and it works with the official apps. It's the app that makes most people realise self-hosting is worth it. Here's the setup guide. Back it up before you trust it with anything real.
3. WireGuard
Not an app as such, but it changes how you run everything else. Put admin panels behind a WireGuard tunnel and they disappear from the public internet. It doubles as a VPN for public Wi-Fi.
4. Forgejo or Gitea
Your own Git hosting, with a web UI that looks a lot like GitHub. Great for private projects, dotfiles and config. Forgejo is the community fork of Gitea. Either is fine, and both are light.
5. Miniflux
An RSS reader that does one thing well. Follow blogs, news sites and YouTube channels without an algorithm deciding what you see. It needs a Postgres database next to it, which also makes it good practice for backing up a database.
6. Umami or Plausible
Privacy-friendly website analytics. If you run a blog or a small site, this tells you what people read without sending their data to Google. No cookie banner needed in most setups.
7. AdGuard Home
DNS-level ad blocking. On a VPS, only use it through your WireGuard tunnel: set the tunnel's DNS to the server's WireGuard address. An open DNS resolver on the public internet will get abused within days.
What I'd hold off on
Nextcloud. It's great, but it's a big PHP app with a database, a cache and background jobs. It wants more RAM than everything above put together, and it's more to maintain. Do it once you're comfortable with the basics.
Your own mail server. Getting mail delivered to Gmail and Outlook without landing in spam is a full-time hobby. Use a mail provider and point your domain at it.
Plex or Jellyfin on a VPS. Video transcoding needs real CPU, and streaming eats bandwidth. Media servers are better at home. If you do want one on a server, get a root server with dedicated cores.
How big a server?
Everything in the main list runs fine together on a small VPS. RAM fills up long before the CPU breaks a sweat. If you're still picking a box, the netcup VPS vouchers get you the first month free, and this post covers VPS vs root server.