I built and operate a 13-service self-hosted platform on a single Linux VPS: a personal AI chat interface, budgeting, RSS, notes, bookmarks, uptime monitoring, a dashboard, dev utilities — and a self-hosted autonomous AI agent. Everything sits behind one reverse proxy with automatic HTTPS, most of it behind single sign-on, and the whole thing is captured as Docker Compose config that survives reboots and rebuilds.
Up front, honestly: this is a personal, self-directed project, and I'd put my level at junior / early-career. I designed and run it, but it isn't an audited, production-grade environment. The value I'd point a reviewer to isn't enterprise completeness — it's the reasoning. So I'm going to lead with the part I cared most about: containing the AI agent.
The decision I'm proudest of (and the mistake behind it)
The interesting security question in this stack is: how do you contain a thing that's actively trying to get around your controls?
The agent — Hermes, by Nous Research — has persistent memory and tool use: it can execute code, browse, and run web searches. It legitimately needs exactly two things from the rest of the stack: the chat front-end (to talk to) and the private metasearch service (to search). It does not need the database, the notes app, the budget data, or the host.
