2 posts tagged with "Self Hosting"

Last year (December 2025), LanguageTool, a popular open-source grammar checker, unfortunately decided to put its browser extension behind a premium subscription paywall. While this decision is unfortunate, there is a workaround to use the browser extension without paying: self-hosting the LanguageTool server. I set up one for myself 3 months ago. It has been working well.

LanguageTool requires a server to process all grammar rules. It handles multiple languages, consuming gigabytes of storage and RAM. Self-hosting means running this server ourselves, and connecting our browser extensions to this server instead of the official LanguageTool server. Even the official server no longer accepts requests from browser extensions, our self-hosted server can. Self-hosting allows us to use the browser extension without a subscription.

There are many online resources available on how to run the LanguageTool server locally on localhost. In this blog post, I will instead demonstrate how to run it on a virtual private cloud server, enabling access from any of your devices, anywhere. Meanwhile, keeping the server unexposed to the public, only accessible to my devices, with Tailscale VPN. Finally, I will share tips for optimizing the performance and resource usage, such as loading n-gram data from a volume, using zram and a swap file to increase the available RAM, and using Netdata to monitor the server performance.

This blog documented my setup for self-hosting a web server. Hopefully this is helpful for others to get started with hosting your web server. I was intimated by all the potential cost and complexity before, but after all, it was not that complicated.

It starts from renting a virtual machine and setting the machine up, to running my web servers in containers, setting DNS records, running Nginx and monitoring tools. All cost me on average less than $4 a month. Including the cost of renting my own domain, it is still less than $5 per month on average.

It gave me a lot of fun to tinker with things. It allows me to host more than 1 web server on the same machine using nginx. I would like to share the steps, thought process and learnings in details.