MinIO: Self-Hosted High-Performance Object Storage

MinIO is the world's fastest S3-compatible object storage system. With over 60,000 GitHub stars, it has become the standard for self-hosted cloud storage, used by organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies. MinIO implements the full Amazon S3 API, which means any application, tool, or library that works with S3 works with MinIO out of the box — backups, media storage, data lakes, application assets, and more.

Self-hosting MinIO gives you Amazon S3 functionality on your own infrastructure with industry-leading read/write performance.

Key Features

• Full Amazon S3 API compatibility — use any S3 client, SDK, or tool without changes
• Industry-leading performance with benchmarks exceeding 300 GB/s throughput
• Erasure coding for data protection without the overhead of full replication
• Bucket versioning for maintaining historical copies of every object
• Server-side encryption with SSE-S3, SSE-C, and SSE-KMS (Vault integration)
• Identity and access management with policies, users, groups, and STS tokens
• Object lifecycle management for automatic tiering, expiration, and transitions
• Multi-site replication for disaster recovery and geographic distribution

Why Self-Host MinIO?

S3 without AWS costs. Amazon S3 charges for storage, requests, and data transfer. These costs compound quickly for applications with heavy read/write patterns. Self-hosted MinIO on a VPS with large SSDs gives you the same API at a fraction of the cost.

Data sovereignty. Object storage often holds your most sensitive assets — user uploads, backups, documents, and media. Self-hosting MinIO keeps all of this on your hardware, in your jurisdiction, under your encryption keys.

Zero egress fees. One of the biggest hidden costs of cloud storage is egress pricing — the fee for downloading your own data. Self-hosted MinIO has no egress charges, making it ideal for applications that read data frequently.

Application backend. MinIO serves as the storage layer for countless applications — Gitea, Mastodon, Grafana Loki, Vaultwarden, and many more support S3-compatible backends. Self-hosting MinIO gives you a unified storage layer for your entire self-hosted stack.

System Requirements

Resource	Minimum	Recommended
CPU	2 vCPUs	4 vCPUs
RAM	2 GB	8 GB
Storage	50 GB SSD	200+ GB SSD
OS	Ubuntu 22.04+	Ubuntu 24.04

MinIO is a single Go binary optimized for performance. Resource usage depends on throughput requirements and concurrent connections. Storage is the primary consideration — size your disks for the data you plan to store. For erasure coding, MinIO recommends at least 4 drives.

Getting Started

Deploy MinIO on your VPS using Docker Compose through Dokploy. Our guide covers single-node setup, persistent volume configuration, console access, bucket policies, and SSL termination.

Deploy MinIO with Dokploy →

Alternatives

• Ceph — Distributed storage system with object, block, and file storage in one platform
• SeaweedFS — Fast distributed storage system for blobs, objects, and files
• Garage — Lightweight S3-compatible distributed storage for self-hosters
• Nextcloud — File sync and share platform with a user-facing interface on top of storage

FAQ

Is MinIO really S3-compatible? Yes. MinIO implements the Amazon S3 API specification. Applications using AWS SDKs, the aws CLI, s3cmd, rclone, or any other S3 client work with MinIO by changing the endpoint URL. No code changes needed.

Can MinIO replace Amazon S3? For private infrastructure, yes. MinIO provides the same API, bucket policies, versioning, and encryption. You won't get AWS's global CDN or serverless integrations, but for application backends, backups, and media storage, self-hosted MinIO is a full replacement.

How does MinIO handle data durability? MinIO uses erasure coding to protect data. It splits objects into data and parity shards across drives. Even if some drives fail, MinIO reconstructs the data from remaining shards. For a single-node setup, regular backups to a separate location are recommended.

What is the MinIO Console? MinIO includes a built-in web UI (Console) for managing buckets, objects, users, and policies. It provides a visual interface similar to the AWS S3 console, making it easy to manage your storage without CLI commands.

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App data sourced from selfh.st open-source directory.