§ 1. Getting the server

As with most things, setting up a server is relatively straighforward once you know what you’re doing.

So, what you want is:

• a machine that runs on the internet for you, awaiting your requests and which
• you can reach from anywhere.

Since both the ‘is reachable’ and the ‘runs constantly’ parts are relatively hard to provide when you’re just starting out (and probably only have a laptop/phone), you want to go to someone who’s job is to provide these two things for this (That’s called a Hosting Provider).

For starting out, the thing you’re looking for is the cheapest option of a Virtual Private Server (called VPS).

So for finding what you’re looking for, google something like hosting provider vps cheap reddit, and see what’s currently in store.

(This should be about 5€/month)

Then go onto the site of your choice, create an account, and rent the VPS you want.

For Hetzner in 02/2026 (the provider I’m currently using), this is something like:

• Cost-optimized
• CX23
• Somewhere in the EU, preferably close to where you are
• Ubuntu (but we’re gonna change that later)
• both a IPv4 and IPv6
• your ssh keys (You might be wondering: What are those?)
• and a name

That’s it.

§ Generating ssh keys

An ssh key is a thing you can use to verify you’re you to someone else.

For now, the only thing that’s important about them is that our server can let us login without a password if we have the correct ssh key available on our system.

So what we need to do is generating a key pair (a private key with a matching public ‘lock’, confusingly also called a key), and then depositing the public key of the pair (so the lock) on the server.
With this, the server will be able to tell that we’re allowed to login whenever we log in from a system that has the private key of this specific key pair.

With this knowledge:

Generate the ssh key pair

And then upload the public key to the hetzner.

You can check that everything worked by sshing onto your server:

If you’re not prompted for a password, everything worked.

§ 2. Put NixOS on the server with Clan

Now for the important part. Just having a server means manual, stateful configuration, and we’re not going to do that.

Instead, we’re going to use NixOS with Clan.

Follow Creating your first Clan.

And that’s it.