Self-host multiple services on one VPS and one IP

There's a point in every self-hosting habit where you stop wanting a server per thing. You've got an app, its database, maybe n8n for automations, a status dashboard, a small API — and running each on its own tiny VPS means five IPs, five bills, five machines to patch. It's tidier, and cheaper, to put them on one box behind one IP.

The trick that makes this work is a reverse proxy. Caddy, nginx or Traefik sits on the public ports 80/443 and routes by hostname: app.you.com goes to your app, n8n.you.com goes to n8n, db-admin.you.com to your admin panel. Every service listens only on localhost; the proxy is the single public door, and it hands each subdomain its own HTTPS certificate automatically.

The plan for this

Medium-IP ($20/mo) is the natural fit: 6 vCPU, 6 GB RAM, 45 GB NVMe, a dedicated IPv4 with every port open. That's room for a handful of small services plus their databases without them fighting for resources.

Two honest boundaries:

• If you're really running just one app plus a database, you don't need Medium — Small-IP ($16) does it.
• If the services are memory-hungry — a big database, a large vector store, in-memory processing — you'll hit the RAM ceiling fast, and that's where a high-memory Pro plan makes more sense than stacking on a 6 GB box.

Setup shape

# Ubuntu 24.04, Medium-IP — Docker + Compose, Caddy as the front door
curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com | sh
# docker-compose.yml: your services on localhost, Caddy routing by subdomain
# Caddy auto-issues HTTPS for each hostname you point at the IP
docker compose up -d

Point your subdomains' A records at the one IP, list them in the Caddyfile, and each service comes up on its own clean HTTPS URL. Add reverse DNS from the dashboard if any of them send mail.

Why here

One dedicated IP you fully control, everything behind it, paid as a single flat crypto bill with no KYC. It's the homelab-on-a-VPS pattern: your stack, your machine, one predictable monthly number. When one box stops being enough, you split the heaviest service onto its own — but most people run comfortably on one for a long time. Medium-IP is where that starts.