Highly recommend using Vaultwarden, API compatible OSS server. It even provides premium features like TOTP for saved sites. I could host it on a small $12/yr VPS but currently host it on a home server. Minimum specs are very low for it as it’s written in Rust.

DO inflates prices for their systems, sometimes I guess it’s worth it but you can get a great dedi with FAR better performance from Hetzner auctions for $32/mo. 64GB RAM, proper CPU, large HDD, could probably host a thousand Vaultwarden instances. Definitely don’t use that for just Vaultwarden, it’s just an example, but yeah.

You can run the open source VaultWarden server (https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden) on way slower hardware. It takes a while for the project to catch up in terms of API support compared to the official server, but it's great for self hosting.

I run Vaultwarden on the free VPS from Google Cloud and it works great.

4 gb of memory for something like this? Absolutely deranged. How can they not see that?

If you self host, why would you need such specs? You would access your server a few times a day at best. Otherwise it just sits there.

You can use vaultwarden, which is a re-implementation in Rust that is much more lightweight than the official .NET version.

I wish they would drop SQL for the self hosting and just use SQLite instead. That's what eats the most RAM on self hosting in .NET version.

Based on their current docker-compose file, it seems like they did away with the MS SQL server, at least: https://github.com/bitwarden/server/blob/master/docker-unifi...

[This issue](https://github.com/bitwarden/server/pull/2487) also suggests SQLite was added as a database driver last December.

Why does it need to run 24/7?

Vaultwarden can run on their $5 droplet.

Aside from the highly relevant cost observations of the sibling comments, one will want to be cognizant of the ... very strange .. opsec that installer uses. It's a lot of curl into bash, self-updating things, url shorteners, and :latest tags

discussed when it was announced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31098608

It makes me think (dangerous, I know) ... I find it odd to use the term "self host" when referring to a third-party cloud. It's someone else's servers and network and electric bill, after all.

Pedantry aside, yeah that seems expensive given the amount of convenience offered. But much more convenient than setting up a server in your basement with a UPS and external backup drives and such.

Self hosting is a scale. But the point is you have the ability to host it how you want. Whether that be on a cloud service that you just throw a docker container at, to a VPS with root, to a bare metal machine co-hosted, to in your basement, the choice is yours.

They are working on reducing the requirements - see https://bitwarden.com/help/install-and-deploy-unified-beta/ which claims 200 MB RAM and 1GB storage requirements.

1. oci has free ARM instances. 2. you don't need much server hw for vaultwarden 3. you don't need a server for keepassxc