this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2026
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Would you say, it is worth it to pay for a VPS for Pangolin? (piefed.social)
submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by DeckPacker@piefed.social to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Hey,
I am currently paying 5,50€ a month for a Hetzner VPS to selfhost a Pangolin instance. I've come to quite rely on Pangolin, because I have to access all of my selfhosted services from my home server from remote. That's because I have to keep my server at home (while I live in a student dorm, which doesn't allow using their network to host servers). Also their authentication and private resources are really good for security and exposing ssh and other stuff from my home server to authenticated clients.

Anyway, I like this setup, because it is fully FOSS and I have 100% control of what my VPS does. It is really expensive though and I am trying to reduce my monthly expenses right now.

I saw online, that you can get a free managed instance of Pangolin on their website (https://pangolin.net/pricing Cloud). It would meet all my needs, but I wouldn't be 1. Fully FOSS (because they probably run the business licensed version of their software) and 2. I wouldn't have full control.

These services work by managing all the https certs themselves, so the have to decrypt all their traffic and send it through the tunnel to your server. Theoretically, Pangolin could log all my traffic to and from my server, which would be a huge privacy risk. But probably they're not, because that would be really impractical...? I don't know.

Do you think, it would be worth the privacy tradeoff for the cost savings?

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[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Maybe as another option, you could try to find a few other students and pool your money for a shared VPS? Back then I used to share an internet connection with few people to make it more affordable. We also used to share some storage space for stuff and the CS students did a website and an internal message board. I'm old, though. No clue how they do it as of today.

[–] DeckPacker@piefed.social 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

That is a cool idea, but unfortunately, I don't know anyone, that would be willing to do this. One of my friends has a selfhosted server, but he doesn't want to pay for stuff like that. He uses everything through a VPN, so he has no running costs.

I did just come up with a pretty good solution though. I looked into Netbird and they actually have tls-passthrough functionality, so I could just run my nginx-reverse proxy locally which handles the certs and encryption and I could be 100% shure, that the company can't read my traffic.

[–] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 2 points 5 days ago

Yeah install a reverse proxy at home and reach it through a service like Netbird or Tailscale. No VPS needed. And it's probably a better idea to do it this way because a local reverse proxy would be 100% self-reliant. Hosting Pangolin on VPS would always make you dependent on the VPS.

NPM (Nginx Proxy Manager) is an Nginx distribution with a friendly UI and it includes certbot so you can get/renew certs automatically and use https://service.yourdomain.com/ URLs if you want.

You will need a DNS provider for that btw, DeSEC.io is free and committed to privacy.