LOG-002 ·
Ninety Days of Hosting My Own Passwords
I moved 214 credentials off a commercial password manager and onto a server I run. Here is the uptime, the cost, and the one incident.
- Words
- 674
- Est. read
- 2.9 min
- Confidence
- 0.87
- Topics
- self-hosting, security, experiment
On 2026-03-14 I migrated every credential I own from a commercial password manager to an instance of Vaultwarden running on a $6/month VPS. The experiment had a defined term: 90 days, ending 2026-06-12, with a written rollback plan in case self-hosting the single most sensitive service in my life turned out to be a mistake. The term ended yesterday. Here are the numbers.
The setup
Vaultwarden is a lightweight, open-source server compatible with Bitwarden's excellent client apps, which means the phones, browsers, and laptops all use polished official clients while the vault itself sits on hardware I control. Configuration, for the record: one VPS (1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM), Caddy for TLS, automatic encrypted backups every 6 hours to two destinations (the NAS at home and an object storage bucket), and the admin panel bound to localhost only, reachable exclusively over a WireGuard tunnel.
Total setup time: 4.2 hours, of which 1.5 were spent testing restores rather than building anything. Migration of 214 logins, 31 secure notes, and 9 identities: 40 minutes via export and import.
The measurements
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Uptime over 90 days | 99.97% (26 minutes down) |
| Backup jobs run / failed | 360 / 0 |
| Restore drills performed | 3 |
| Median restore time | 11 minutes |
| Sync failures noticed on clients | 1 |
| Monthly cost, all-in | $6.75 |
| Previous subscription cost | $3.33 |
Yes, self-hosting costs more than the subscription did. Anyone who tells you self-hosting is about saving money has not measured it. The $3.42/month premium is what I pay for a different property entirely: the vault's availability no longer depends on a company's servers, business model, or breach disclosure timeline.
The incident
Day 47. The VPS provider performed unannounced host maintenance and my instance was unreachable for 26 minutes. Here is the finding that justified the whole experiment: nothing happened. Every client kept working from its local cache. Reads worked, autofill worked. Only writes queued until the server returned, then synced cleanly.
This is the under-appreciated property of well-designed sync software, and it is worth stating plainly: the server is a synchronization point, not a dependency for daily function. My passwords would survive the VPS provider disappearing tonight, because every device holds a full encrypted copy and I hold two more in backups I have actually restored from. Three restore drills is not paranoia. A backup you have not restored from is a rumor. I have said this before and will keep saying it.
The honest caveats
First: I am the security team now. Vaultwarden published two security advisories during my 90 days and patching was my job. My update latency averaged 2.1 days. A managed service would have been faster, and for people who will not patch, the managed service is genuinely the safer choice. Decentralization does not remove work. It relocates it to someone whose incentives are aligned, namely you, with the caveat that you have to actually do it.
Second: the threat model changed rather than shrank. I no longer worry about a vendor's mass breach exposing my vault alongside millions of others. I now worry about my own VPS hardening. On net I prefer my new problem, because I am a smaller target and the blast radius is one household, but reasonable people can weigh it differently.
Third: household usability. My wife's verdict after 90 days: she could not tell anything changed. This is the correct outcome and the hardest one to achieve.
Verdict
The rollback plan is now deleted. The experiment converts to production. I put 0.87 on still running this instance in 24 months, with the residual 0.13 covering the scenario where maintaining it stops being worth my time, which is a real cost I will keep logging.
The general lesson, priced: for $3.42/month over the subscription and roughly 20 minutes of maintenance per month, the master list of keys to my life now lives in a building I can point to. Whether that trade is worth it depends on your numbers. But run the numbers. Do not let either the hype or the fear do the arithmetic for you.