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!
I self host vaultwarden and its great. Its an easy self host, and in my experience, it has never gone down on me.
That being said, my experience is anecdotal. If you do go the vaultwarden route, realize that your vault is still accessible on your devices (phone, whatever) even if your server goes down, or if you just lose network connectivity. They hold local (encrypted at rest) copies of your vault that are periodically updated.
Additionally, regardless of the route you take you should absolutely be practicing a good 3-2-1 backup strategy with your password vault, as with any other data you value.
This: backups might be a pain to handle. Bitwarden does that for you + redundancy.
Depends on the amount of work the person does. I know I’m a lazy self hoster that takes time to update software.