Paperless-ngx Hosting on Your Own VPS

Paperless-ngx is an open-source (GPL-3.0) document management system: you feed it scans, PDFs and photos of paper, it reads the text with OCR, files each document with tags and metadata, and keeps everything searchable. Choose it with a plan, pay, and we build the VPS (KVM, NVMe, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS) and install it in about seven minutes after boot, most of it the first database setup. You get:

• Paperless-ngx 3.3.4 with PostgreSQL 18 and Valkey (a Redis-compatible store) for its task queue, with the worker count sized to your plan.
• An HTTPS address like yourname-x7k2.devoster.app with a Let's Encrypt certificate.
• Your admin account already created. You log in with a username, admin, and a generated password shown in the Devoster dashboard, where you can also reset it. Public sign-up is off, so only you create accounts.
• Dashboard controls to open the app, restart, stop or start it, read its logs, run an update and connect your own domain.

The app is free; you pay only the VPS plan, with 10% off yearly. The server comes with full root, free nightly backups kept 3 days plus one snapshot, a dedicated IPv4, 1 Gbps with unlimited bandwidth and DDoS protection. See the other apps that install this way on the One-Click Apps page.

There are three ways in, and you can use all of them:

• Upload in the browser: drag files onto the web app, from a computer or a phone.
• The consume folder over SFTP: anything dropped into /opt/devoster/data/paperless/consume is imported and then removed from the folder. Point a scanner's "scan to SFTP" option or a sync script at it, using the server's SSH login.
• Email import: Paperless-ngx can check IMAP mailboxes and import attachments according to mail rules you set. This is incoming mail fetched by the server, so the outbound mail block doesn't affect it.

File types: PDFs and images (such as scans saved as JPEG, PNG or TIFF) are supported. Office documents (.docx, .xlsx and similar) and .eml email files are not: those need two extra services, Tika and Gotenberg, which this install leaves out to keep memory free for OCR. Export Office files to PDF before you add them.

OCR languages: OCR is set to English. German, French, Italian and Spanish are also installed, and you can switch to one of them, or combine them, in Paperless-ngx's OCR settings. Other languages, Hebrew included, are not installed, so text in them won't be recognised.

Once a document's text is read, Paperless-ngx files it for you. The parts people use most:

• Tags, correspondents and document types describe each document: who sent it, what it is, and anything else you want to group by.
• Automatic matching assigns those from the content. Its default mode learns from the documents you have already filed, so it gets better as you correct it.
• Custom fields and workflows add your own fields, such as an amount or a due date, and actions that run when a document arrives.
• Full-text search across everything, with a "more like this" view for similar documents.
• Originals kept. Paperless-ngx stores an archive PDF/A version for reading and search alongside the unaltered original file.
• Several users with global and per-document permissions, for a household or a small office.

Start with a few broad tags and correspondents, let a few dozen documents come in, and correct what it gets wrong; the matching follows your corrections.

Paperless-ngx with its database and queue uses about 775 MB of RAM at idle. The load comes from OCR: each scanned page is processed in memory, so a long multi-page scan is the heaviest thing it does. The install sizes the number of documents processed in parallel to the plan: one on Micro, two on Starter and up.

Watch the disk as well as the RAM: Paperless-ngx keeps both the original and an archive version of most documents. You can upgrade to a larger plan from the panel later.

A document archive holds bank statements, contracts and IDs, so treat its login seriously:

• Turn on two-factor authentication in Paperless-ngx and keep its recovery codes. Note that a password reset from the Devoster dashboard does not bypass two-factor, so losing the second factor and the codes can lock you out.
• No email from the app. Outbound mail ports are blocked by default on Devoster VPS plans, so Paperless-ngx's email notifications and password-reset emails don't send. Reset the admin password from the dashboard instead. Importing from IMAP mailboxes still works.
• Keep it off the open internet if you like. The app is on public HTTPS with a login. If only your own devices need it, you can reach the server through a VPN such as our WireGuard server and restrict access yourself with root.

Backups: nightly backups (3 days) and your snapshot slot cover the whole VPS. For an archive you can't recreate, also keep a copy off the server: Paperless-ngx's document exporter writes every document and its metadata to the export folder, which you can then copy away over SFTP.

We test new Paperless-ngx versions and apply them in a maintenance hour you choose, or when you press Update now. A snapshot of the VPS is taken first, and if Paperless-ngx doesn't come back healthy the server is rolled back automatically. Database migrations run as part of the update. The app's own update check is switched off, since the panel handles versions.

The server is unmanaged: you have full root, and its security and your documents are your responsibility. We don't provide help organising an archive; Paperless-ngx's documentation covers matching, workflows and mail rules in depth. Our VPS hardening checklist is worth an hour on any server holding personal documents.

When is this the wrong choice? If you need Office documents ingested as they are, or OCR in a language other than the five installed, you would need your own Paperless-ngx setup on a plain Devoster VPS. And if your documents must stay outside the US, note the servers are in Utah.