Bluesky PDS VPSHost your Bluesky accounts on your own server, with the official AT Protocol PDS

Bluesky is built on the AT Protocol (atproto). Every account is hosted by a PDS, short for Personal Data Server: it handles the account's sign-in and keys, stores its data repository (posts, likes, follows) and media, then broadcasts every change to a relay. App Views, such as Bluesky's, read that stream to build feeds and profiles. Your PDS does not display a feed itself: your accounts are used in the Bluesky app.

Yes. The PDS is developed by Bluesky PBC and released under your choice of the MIT or Apache 2.0 licence. There is no licence to buy: the prices shown on this page are for the VPS. OnetSolutions is not affiliated with Bluesky.

Yes, in practice. The PDS must be reachable under a stable public DNS name, and that name is written into the identity of the accounts it hosts. The address generated at deployment is for testing; attach your domain in the Domains tab before creating the first account, then check that the PDS_HOSTNAME variable picks it up. Changing the address afterwards requires migrating the accounts, otherwise the PDS and the relay fall out of sync.

Sign-ups require an invite code by default. Connect to the VPS over SSH and use pdsadmin, installed in the PDS container at deployment, to create an account directly or generate invite codes. Your users then sign up in the Bluesky app by choosing your PDS as the hosting provider and entering their code.

By default, an account gets a handle under the PDS's subdomain, for example alice.pds.your-domain.com. For these handles to verify, the PDS needs a wildcard DNS record and an HTTPS certificate for each subdomain, which the deployment does not set up. The simplest option is to then switch each account to a handle on its own domain, verified by an _atproto TXT record, from the Bluesky app's settings.

One Click Apps requires at least 2 vCPU, 2 GB of RAM and 30 GB of disk, of which 1 GB of memory is reserved for the system and the platform. That is above what Bluesky recommends for a PDS with 1 to 20 users: 1 core, 1 GB of RAM and 20 GB of SSD. Plan for more disk if your accounts post a lot of images or videos.

The PDS volume, with its databases and media, is backed up every day at 3 am and kept for 7 days, on the VPS disk: this protects you from a mistake in the app, not from losing the server. For that, add the VPS backup option (from €1.99 excl. VAT/month) or take a snapshot. Also keep a copy of the generated secrets off the server, including the PLC rotation key, as they are variables and not files in the volume.

Every night, the platform checks whether a new PDS version has been published and the console lets you know. Nothing is updated without your action: you start the update from the console, and the data is kept. Bluesky recommends keeping your PDS up to date.

Our support covers the VPS: the server, its network, its storage and its availability. The PDS, its configuration, the accounts it hosts, their moderation and their updates remain your responsibility: the console gives you the tools to manage them, and you keep root access to the server.