/Tech5h ago

Developer Runs Claude Code Solely on VPS for a Year

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Original post

✨ I think I've been coding almost solely on my VPS with Claude Code for almost a year now

All I can say it's just fantastic: - no need to keep laptop open ever - no laptop battery drain - can switch to phone or any other device you like whenever you want to continue (like when you're outside) - it just keeps going all night while you sleep (esp with /goal) - you can start hacky projects from scratch and go live in seconds because you're already on the server which is great to ship things and get it used by people fast (not stuck on your local laptop webserver) - it just feels like living in the future

I used to code on my laptop, test locally, then push to GitHub, then it auto pulled and deploy to production, that'd take me ~1 minute to get a new feature out

But then when I bought a new Mac Book Pro a few years ago I was too lazy to install a local Nginx environment, so I just started pushing to prod and everything went fine, and I sped up deploying to about 3 seconds from laptop to server, which people called me crazy for too

But now with Claude Code on my VPS in the last year, it just live edits on my production server, which sounds like it should go wrong but it just doesn't, it's very careful and only twice in 12 months messed up which meant my site didn't load for 10 seconds which is OK

If I wasn't working solo, like at a big company, I' think I'd recommend the same workflow but with a staging server, so it wouldn't touch production, for safety and regulatory reasons etc. but for me it's fine

I agree with @theo completely, it's clear to me this is where it's going, also seeing @karpathy with Claude moving to the cloud (via Slack etc), I think AI "agents" and AI coding will operate on servers / from the cloud first

P.S. I have 3-2-1 backups, multiple on-site and off-site backups which you should also even if you wouldn't code with AI, safety first!

Theo - t3.gg@theo

I’d estimate we’re ~6 months from most devs moving their code agents off of their laptops

2:22 AM · Jun 28, 2026 · 271.5K Views

Sentiment

Positive users praise running Claude on VPS and vanilla PHP/JS stacks for simplicity and instant production updates, while negative users flag risks like security holes and uncontrolled live edits.

Pos

89.6%

Neg

10.4%

41 comments with sentiment.

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VIEWS59.6KBOOKMARKS67LIKES236RETWEETS8REPLIES45

@levelsio@levelsio

If you use vanilla PHP and vanilla JS there is nothing to be restarted!

Nicola@NicolaManzini

@levelsio I don't understand. You change the code in prod then restart the whatever runner when the code is ready? Do you have a preview runner to check that the LLM does its job? Do you look at the code?

3h59.6K23667

@levelsio@levelsio

@selfhostedmind No sounds like overengineering to me

4h1.3K151

kayhe@selfhostedmind

@levelsio it's great but stateful, have you tried wiring up on-demand coding sandboxes with tailscale so they can hit the vps when needed but you can spawn many of them in parallel etc

4h1.4K51

@levelsio@levelsio

@callumduffy0311 About $200/mo

2h34922

peetzweg/@peetzweg

@levelsio This is the way it seems. 160k contributions on gh. Insane. Only less commits than open ai flat rate coder @steipete

4h69411

Sandi Slonjšak@sandislonjsak

I started setting this up for my company (13 people)

I will do the staging env and just copy for now since I am afraid of telling claude to just push things to prod

How do you test this out? Or do you test in prod? How often does CC seriously screw up the prod?

I see you have a lot of safeguards, but I can imagine this going wrong so I am genuinely curious.

5h2K4

@levelsio@levelsio

@sandislonjsak It only screwed up twice in 12 months, it made a PHP error on my site so it went down for 10 seconds then fixed it

4h1.7K6

Mick.net - Saas 💻 & Aviation ✈️@mick__net

@levelsio Remote Codex on VPS via ChatGTP iPhone app is another step up over SSH terminals.

- easier switching between multiple VPS instances, and chat threads, and Macbook’s - voice dictation build in - app can return video recordings and screenshot. - notifications

4h39821

Sean@sean_from_earth

@levelsio I don't get it. Don't you ever make larger changes? I constantly iterate toward a final UI, sometimes completely redoing it. Like, you're just doing that live?

4h5084

Prof Adebayo@ProfAdebay

@levelsio how do you send screenshots to agent while coding on cloud?

this is my main problem now...

2h261

kayhe@selfhostedmind

@levelsio meh you don't need to spin it up yourself, you just need to set tailscale inside your claude code web/codex web setup script and they handle the sandboxes for you

then you can work on many features in parallel, each sandbox has its own environment etc without collisions

4h1884

AzFlin 🗿@AzFlin

@levelsio Editing code right on prod without having to git push from local feels so wrong lmao

4h5827

@levelsio@levelsio

@peetzweg @steipete Oh nice, which site is this? And hi @jmeistrich!

3h149

Goran k@atgorans_k

@levelsio I used to do vanilla JS and CSS for everything, then I moved to Nextjs, and I regret it now

AI has reduced the need for a framework by a lot, and all we are left are dependency headaches

1h1161

Ben@bennycraven

@levelsio Most of the time I am ssh’d into my VPS (with Claude running on the VPS), but when I step away and want to keep things moving, I move over to the Claude app on my phone and connect into that session from there. Also nice because it’s easy to add screenshots .

1h107

@levelsio@levelsio

@petergyang Make a VPS on http://hetzner.com, SSH in, install Claude Code! Make sure to add Tailscale and Cloudflare Tunnels and then make a Firewall in Hetzner with nothing in it to block all inbound traffic

20m961

Alexis 🇫🇷@Alexislamouv

@levelsio Hey @levelsio, I’m a beginner and want to do that myself too. Do you have good documentation about this ? Or maybe an article would be great.

« How I put my AC in my VPS ? » kidding for this one 🤣

2h521

@levelsio@levelsio

@ThomasGrayX Can you explain? Why you block it off?

3h1.1K1

Sandi Slonjšak@sandislonjsak

@levelsio Also a question, how do you “check” frontend work visually after it’s been done?

4h2302

Henrique Sardinha@henriquepreze

@levelsio Termius + Tmux?

4h3671