Your own server.

Ten minutes by hand. Then stop typing.

One box. $5 a month.

What you are buying

Any provider with a small Linux instance works. Around $5 / €5 a month buys roughly 1–4 GB of RAM, a shared vCPU and 20–50 GB of disk. Prices and tiers move constantly — treat the names below as where to look, not as a quote.

Widely used, global regions

Europe

Asia-Pacific, and elsewhere

Pick the region deliberately. Two things depend on it and neither is speed: the jurisdiction your memory store sits in, and — if you are in the EU or serving EU users — whether you have just made your own life harder under GDPR. An EU-resident host is the simpler answer there. Otherwise choose the city closest to you, not the cheapest one.

Tiding wants native PostgreSQL with pgvector, plus an in-process embedding model of about 520 MB. 2 GB of RAM is a comfortable start; 1 GB works if you keep the rest of the box quiet. ARM instances are cheaper and work here if packages have an arm64 build. Resizing later means downtime — start a little above the minimum.

The part you do by hand

Everything here is done once, as root, before any agent is involved. It exists so the agent has a safe account to work in and a name to get a certificate for.

1. Create the instance

   Ubuntu LTS. Paste your SSH public key into the create form — doing it now means you never enable password login at all.

2. Point a DNS name at it

   An A record for the host you want, e.g. memory.example.com → the instance IP. Do this early; certificates need the name to resolve.

3. Update, and make yourself a user

   Log in as root once and run the update, then create a normal account with sudo and copy your key to it. From then on you log in as that user, not root.

4. Install your agent, and stop typing

   Install whichever coding agent you use, log in as your user, and start it in a working directory. That is the end of the manual part.

apt update && apt full-upgrade -y
adduser you
usermod -aG sudo you
rsync --archive --chown=you:you ~/.ssh /home/you/

Direct the server. Do not administer it by hand.

This is the actual technique: you are not learning to administer a server, you are learning to direct one. Work in small steps, ask for an explanation before a change, and ask for evidence after it.

Give the agent sudo through your user — not a root login. An agent with sudo can do anything you can do, which is the point and also the risk. Small steps keep it reviewable.

You are on a fresh Ubuntu server that will be on the public
internet. Change nothing yet. Tell me: what is installed, what
is listening on a port, what the firewall state is, and what
you would change before this box is exposed. List it as
findings, worst first.

Do the standard hardening for a small public server:
unattended security upgrades, a firewall allowing only SSH,
HTTP and HTTPS, SSH key-only authentication, and fail2ban.
Explain each change before you make it, and after each one
show me the command that proves it took effect.

Install nginx and certbot. Set up memory.example.com with a
Let's Encrypt certificate. Then prove renewal actually works
with a dry run — do not just tell me it is configured.

That last sentence matters more than it looks. A certificate that installs cleanly and silently fails to renew is a site that breaks in ninety days.

Install Tiding from https://github.com/iXanadu/tiding
on this server, following the repo's install scripts.
Use native PostgreSQL with pgvector — not SQLite. Run the
server as its own service user, never as root or as me. Bind
it to loopback. Put nginx in front only if we are exposing
it, and keep the default: a network bind without auth must
refuse to start. Read SECURITY.md first and tell me what it
requires before you start. Then prove /health returns ok.

The embedding model (~520 MB) downloads on first start and runs in-process. No external embedding API, no extra keys.

Proof, not a report

Worth knowing

• The agent has your sudoGive it a user account, not a root login
• $5 is the box, not the backupsAsk it to set up an off-box backup of PostgreSQL too
• This host will hold every memoryIts disk is your team’s long-term memory
• Cheap instances are sharedFine for tools; not for anything latency-critical