Home Assistant on a VPS,
with stable remote access.
Home Assistant Container or Core, hosted on Pulsar67 metal. Bridge into your home network with a WireGuard tunnel and run your automations from a server that won't brick when the power flickers. From $5/mo.
A smart home that survives a power blip.
Home Assistant on a Pi is the default - until the SD card corrupts in month 8 and you lose every automation. Or your ISP cycles your IP and Nabu Casa charges $6.50/mo to make remote access work.
A VPS gives you a stable IP, real disk durability, snapshots before risky updates, and remote access from anywhere without paying a subscription to access your own house.
Note: Home Assistant Container (Docker) or Core run great on a VPS. HassOS is the supervised distribution and is intended for dedicated hardware - not the right fit for a multi-tenant VPS.
Remote without Nabu
Your VPS is reachable from anywhere by design. No paid cloud relay - just your domain, your reverse proxy.
Tunnel to local devices
WireGuard from VPS to your home router lets HA discover Zigbee2MQTT, Z-Wave, ESPHome over the tunnel.
Snapshot, then upgrade
Quarterly HA breaking changes don't bite. Snapshot before docker compose pull, roll back if needed.
Real uptime
99.9% SLA. Your motion-activated lights work even when your home internet doesn't.
Sizing for entities and add-ons.
HA Container itself is light; the add-ons (MQTT, Zigbee2MQTT, Frigate without GPU) add up.
- 1 vCPU
- 2 GB RAM
- 40 GB SAS SSD
- Up to ~100 entities, no Frigate
- 4 vCPU
- 8 GB RAM
- 160 GB SAS SSD
- 500+ entities, MQTT + Zigbee2MQTT + Node-RED
- 8 vCPU
- 32 GB RAM
- 500 GB SAS SSD
- Recorder retention, Frigate-CPU, room to grow
Recipe for a cloudy smart home.
The trick is the VPN bridge to your local devices.
- A Pulsar67 VPS (Pulsar Pro is the sweet spot)
- Ubuntu 22.04 or Debian 12
- Docker + docker-compose - official Home Assistant Container image
- A WireGuard tunnel from your VPS to your home router (so HA can reach local-only devices like Zigbee2MQTT bridges)
- A domain pointed at your VPS + a reverse proxy (Caddy works well)
- An MQTT broker (Mosquitto Docker image) if you have MQTT devices
- A backup strategy - HA's
config/directory is the whole world - Hardware on the local side: a Zigbee/Z-Wave stick on a Pi or NUC at home that forwards over the tunnel
A smart home host that doesn't go dumb.
SAS SSD = fast UI
HA's UI hits the recorder DB on every page. SAS SSD makes it feel native, not "loading…"
Daily snapshots
A bad configuration.yaml edit can wreck a session. Restore in seconds, not "hope you have a backup."
Cheaper than Nabu
Pulsar Starter is $5. Nabu Casa Cloud is $6.50. And the VPS does a hundred other things too.
DDoS protected
Always-on mitigation helps protect public Home Assistant endpoints during attacks.
Ready to ditch the SD card?
Spin up a VPS, install HA Container, tunnel to home. Your smart home grows up.