Run your own Nostr relay on a VPS (strfry, your rules)

Nostr's whole point is that no single company owns your social graph — your identity is a keypair, and your notes live on relays anyone can run. Running your own relay on a VPS gives your events an always-on home you control: your own policies, a durable copy of everything you publish, and one more node making the network harder to censor. Fittingly, you can pay for it in crypto with no KYC.

What a Nostr relay needs

• A dedicated IPv4, a domain and WSS. Clients connect to wss://relay.yourdomain.com, so you need a domain, valid TLS and inbound 443 — a dedicated-IP plan. NAT plans don't take inbound. Nano-IP ($8/mo) suits a personal relay; Small-IP for a small community.
• Disk for retention. Events accumulate. A personal relay is tiny; a busy public relay with long retention wants more disk (NVMe keeps queries fast).
• Modest RAM/CPU. strfry is efficient — a personal relay barely registers.

Set up strfry (Ubuntu 24.04)

# dedicated-IP plan, root shell
apt update && apt install -y git build-essential libssl-dev zlib1g-dev liblmdb-dev \
  libflatbuffers-dev libsecp256k1-dev libzstd-dev

git clone https://github.com/hoytech/strfry && cd strfry
git submodule update --init
make setup-golpe && make -j$(nproc)

# minimal config
mkdir -p /var/lib/strfry
cp strfry.conf /etc/strfry.conf
sed -i 's#db = "./strfry-db/"#db = "/var/lib/strfry/"#' /etc/strfry.conf

# run it (bind to localhost; a reverse proxy terminates TLS on 443)
./strfry --config /etc/strfry.conf relay

Put Caddy in front for automatic HTTPS + WSS on your domain:

apt install -y caddy
cat > /etc/caddy/Caddyfile <<'EOF'
relay.yourdomain.com {
  reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:7777
}
EOF
systemctl restart caddy
ufw allow 80/tcp && ufw allow 443/tcp

Point your Nostr client at wss://relay.yourdomain.com and you're publishing to a relay you own.

Make it yours (policies)

strfry supports a write-policy plugin so you decide who can publish:

• Personal relay — accept writes only from your own pubkey(s); anyone can still read. This keeps it small, fast and spam-free.
• Community / allowlist — accept a set of pubkeys (a group, a project).
• Anti-spam — reject events by kind, size, or rate.

Read access can stay open so your notes propagate, while writes stay locked down.

Why EQVPS for a Nostr relay

• Dedicated IPv4 from $8/mo, domain + WSS friendly, all ports, self-service rDNS.
• EU locations (Germany, Finland) — clean routes, real data-protection law.
• No KYC, crypto payment. Email to sign up, USDC/USDT to pay — fitting for a crypto-native, decentralized protocol.
• Root in ~60 seconds, NVMe. Build strfry, put Caddy in front, and your relay is live.

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