Self-host vs PostHog Cloud: Self-hosting PostHog means managing the service yourself and taking care of upgrades, scaling, security etc. If you are less technical or looking for a hands-off experience, we recommend PostHog Cloud. You can also find support partners to manage the service for you via the PostHog Marketplace.
We provide a PostHog "hobby deployment" option for those that want to try out self-hosted PostHog without having to spend a lot on infrastructure costs.
This type of deployment is aimed at users who want to test out the platform or do some minimal tracking (e.g. for a personal blog, or to test PostHog as simply as possible with low volumes).
It should not be used as a production instance for tracking a product with any reasonable amount of scale.
Pre-requisites
- You have deployed a Linux Ubuntu Virtual Machine.
- A $10/month (2GB RAM) droplet on DigitalOcean can handle approximately 100k events spread over a month
- We recommend a $20/ month (4GB RAM) if you expect any surges in event volumes
- Over 100K we'd recommend our Scale deployment methods
You can click on the badge below to get US$100 in credit over 60 days (i.e. run PostHog for free for ~2 months).
Quick install on an Ubuntu VM
For a quick install that uses Docker, run the following command:
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/posthog/posthog/HEAD/bin/deploy-hobby)"
Upgrading
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/posthog/posthog/HEAD/bin/upgrade-hobby)"
Migrating
If you need to move into production or if your server is struggling, you can migrate to a production instance as follows:
- to PostHog Cloud for hands-off experience
- to a bigger self-hosted instance