Stop Guessing if Your Servers are Up: Free VPS Monitoring Guide

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In this video, I explore how to set up Uptime Kuma on a Free VPS using Docker Compose to create a robust, 24/7 monitoring solution for your home lab or AI applications. I dive into the practical logic of utilising free-tier cloud resources to ensure your services stay online without adding to your monthly overhead.

The discussion covers the end-to-end deployment of a modern monitoring stack. I walk through my docker-compose.yaml configuration, which integrates Uptime Kuma for service availability alerts, Caddy for automatic SSL encryption, and the Beszel Agent for lightweight host metrics.

Practical Tips: Best practices for managing your monitoring environment via the terminal and keeping your containers up to date.

Whether you're looking to monitor a complex AI workflow or just want a reliable status page for your personal projects, this setup provides a professional-grade solution at zero cost, and that includes running from a free VPS server.

CHAPTERS:

00:00 Intro: The Power of a Free Monitoring VPS
00:08 Tour of the Uptime Kuma Dashboard
00:32 Understanding Service Availability & Response Times
00:57 Monitoring More Than Just Websites (TCP & ICMP)
01:15 Public Status Pages for Users
01:38 Infrastructure Logic: Why "Outside-In" Monitoring Matters
04:25 Different hosting options considered
07:28 Big Free Tier VPS Providers Pros and Cons
10:17 Visualizing Server Resources with Beszel
12:44 Conceptual Overview of the Free VPS and Applications
15:02 Security & Firewall Best Practices for VPS
16:04 Docker Compose Walkthrough: Caddy, Kuma, and Beszel
18:08 Updating your Containers
19:33 Outro: Final Thoughts

LINKS:

My Uptime Docker Compose Stack — https://github.com/Danie10/yaml-snippets/blob/main/uptimevpscompose.yaml
My Caddyfile config — https://github.com/Danie10/yaml-snippets/blob/main/uptimevpsCaddyfile
Automate update script for containers — https://github.com/Danie10/yaml-snippets/blob/main/uptimevps_update_stack.sh
My Beszel video —

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#technology #opensource #uptimemonitoring #selfhosting #freevps

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Video Summary
The speaker outlines the practical application of Uptime Kuma, a self-hosted monitoring tool that tracks service availability, response times, and performance metrics. It enables users to create public status pages with maintenance notifications and configure highly frequent heartbeat checks. Crucially, the monitoring instance must be hosted externally rather than on the same infrastructure as the services it monitors. Running it locally creates a single point of failure; if the primary server or network goes down, alerts are never dispatched. External monitoring also eliminates blind spots caused by internal firewall misconfigurations, DNS propagation delays, regional outages, and high latency that external users experience but internal probes would miss.

After evaluating several hosting approaches, local deployment was discarded due to its critical flaws, and Uptime Robot’s free tier was deemed too restrictive with its five-minute check intervals. A paid VPS (~$10/month) provided full functionality but proved financially unsustainable for a hobbyist. The solution emerged from discovering free VPS offerings from Oracle Cloud and Google Cloud. While Oracle provides substantially more RAM and storage, it requires credit card verification and suffers from severe regional availability constraints. Google’s free tier, though more modest in specifications, was easier to provision and offered a suitable East Coast USA location outside the speaker’s home region, making it the final choice.

Running Uptime Kuma on the Google Cloud VPS proves highly efficient. Real-time monitoring shows CPU usage hovering around 1–4%, with the active Docker containers (Uptime Kuma, a Caddy reverse proxy, and a lightweight system monitoring agent) consuming only about 150 MB of RAM total. Disk usage remains low at approximately 6.7 GB after a week of operation, and network bandwidth is minimal. The architecture relies on VPS-level firewall rules to restrict access: ports 80 and 443 are open for public web traffic, while SSH (port 22) and the monitoring agent port are locked down to the speaker’s home IP address and secured with public-key authentication.

Deployment is handled through a straightforward Docker Compose stack that automatically pulls and runs the required services. Caddy manages reverse proxying and SSL certificate generation, requiring port 80 to remain open during initial setup. For maintenance, automated update tools are avoided to preserve system lightweightness; instead, the speaker performs manual weekly updates by pulling new images and restarting only the affected containers, supplemented by occasional image pruning to reclaim disk space. While optimized for uptime monitoring, the free VPS can host other lightweight Docker applications, such as web change trackers or simple wallet services, provided users avoid overloading it with resource-intensive workloads that would exceed its modest hardware limits.