this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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I am looking into password managers, as number of my accounts are increasing. Currently I am weighing two options:

  • Host Vaultwarden on a VPS, or
  • Use the free bitwarden service.

I want to know how they are in practical aspects.

While I am fine self-hosting many services, password managers seem to be one of the most critical services that should not admit downtime. I surely cannot keep it up, as I need to update it time to time.

On the other hand, using bitwarden might require some level of trust. How much should I trust the company to use the free service? How do I know if my passwords would be safe, not being exposed to the wide net?

I want to gauge pros and cons, are there aspects I missed? How are your opinions on this? If you are self-hosting vaultwarden, how do you manage the downtime? Thanks in advance!

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It’s important to specify that the items are encrypted using a key derived from your password, so Bitwarden themselves don’t have access to your passwords even if they wanted to.

Since they handle redundancy and backups I think it’s fine staying with them (+ great product)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

Since they handle redundancy and backups I think it’s fine staying with them (+ great product)

This. I love self hosting services, but anything that I 100% can't live without isn't one of them. Because I don't have the funds for proper redundancy/high availability, and my backup practices at home are..... Not ideal. I've had a couple brushes with data loss due to gaps in backups, lack of monitoring for impending hardware failures, and had 2 disks suddenly die together in a raid array, all in over a decade of self hosting.

I have cold backups of most of my critical services, but they're not nearly regular enough for me to trust my passwords to myself.