Hello everyone!
I recently switched my Android phone to a custom ROM, and while setting things up, I wanted push notifications without relying on Google. That’s how I discovered UnifiedPush.
Really liking the concept, I decided to rent a small VPS (1 vCPU, 2GB RAM) and started hosting NTFY. So far, it’s been working great. Over time, I’ve added a few more services like FreshRSS and Audiobookshelf.
All of this is just for personal use, so the resource usage is minimal (the whole setup only uses around 500MB of RAM). I really enjoy how much value you can get out of such a small machine.
That brings me to my question:
What other lightweight, self-hostable tools would you recommend? I’m especially interested in small, resource-efficient services that you’ve personally found useful.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions!


XMPP server (Prosody) that can also act as a Unified Push distributor.
My favorite as well.
Nice! I think XMPP is the best approach to messaging, as it is decentralized and can be E2E (and more mature than e.g. Matrix). The problem is that I won’t be able to convince anyone I know to use XMPP (Signal was a huge struggle already).
For now you can use XMPP with the Slidge Signal gateway. At some point there will be an issue with Signal due to their centralized servers in the US and then you will be happy to not depend on it so much.