Why host Open WebUI on a VPS rather than locally?
Local hosting works for testing, but it has real limits in production: it consumes machine resources, offers no remote access, and provides no high availability. A VPS solves these problems: it runs 24/7, is accessible from any device, and gives you full control.
What You Can Do With Open WebUI
- Chat with local models via Ollama (Mistral, LLaMA 3, Gemma, etc.) or with the OpenAI API
- Manage several models and switch between them in one click from a unified interface
- Create and share custom assistants with tailored system instructions
- Upload and analyse documents (PDF, text) directly in the chat thanks to built-in RAG support
- Open access to your team with a system of user accounts and roles
- Review the full history of your conversations, stored on your own server
Prerequisites
Open WebUI requires Docker to run. Ollama (if you want to run an LLM locally on the server) is RAM-hungry. Plan for at least 4 GB of RAM for a 7B model, and 8 GB for a 13B model. If you only use external APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic), 2 GB of RAM is enough for the interface.
Deployment in 5 steps
Prepare your VPS
Order a Cloud VPS with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Update the system: apt update && apt upgrade -y. Enable the UFW firewall and allow the SSH (22), HTTP (80), and HTTPS (443) ports.
Install Docker
Install Docker Engine from the official Docker repository. Add your user to the docker group to avoid repeated sudo commands. Verify the installation: docker run hello-world.
Start Open WebUI
Pull the official Docker image and launch the container, exposing port 3000. Mount a volume to persist data across restarts. Open WebUI is accessible at http://votre-ip:3000.
Configure a reverse proxy (Nginx)
Install Nginx and set up a virtual host that proxies requests to port 3000. Use Certbot (Let's Encrypt) to obtain a free SSL certificate. Your interface will be accessible over HTTPS on your domain.
Connect your models
In the Open WebUI interface, configure your API connections: local Ollama, OpenAI, Anthropic, or any other compatible provider. Create user accounts as needed.
The shortcut: install from the Marketplace
If your VPS is a ServOrbit Cloud VPS, you do not have to walk through the steps above. From your client area, open the Marketplace in the server management panel, look up Open WebUI and confirm the install: the container and its dependencies are deployed for you. Two steps remain that nobody can take on your behalf — creating the administrator account on first connection (the first account created takes that role, so open it yourself without waiting) and declaring your model source in the admin settings. Plan for at least 4 GB of RAM and 2 vCPU if you run Ollama on the same machine: the interface is light, the models are what weigh. The manual route keeps its value as soon as you want control over the Docker composition, a pinned version, or Open WebUI wired into existing infrastructure.
Pin the signing key from the very first start
Open WebUI signs every session token with WEBUI_SECRET_KEY. If you do not declare it, one is drawn at random on first launch and written into the data directory: as long as that volume persists, all is well. The day the volume is recreated, the key changes — and you get access denied with perfectly valid credentials, a misleading symptom that sends people hunting through passwords. The same key also encrypts stored secrets (OAuth tokens, API credentials): losing it does not merely drop sessions, it makes those secrets unreadable. Generate it once with openssl rand -hex 32, put it in your environment file, and treat it as a production secret. If you run several instances behind a load balancer they must all carry the same value, otherwise a token issued by one is rejected by another.
If you want to run an Ollama model directly on the same VPS, opt for a plan with at least 8 GB of RAM and NVMe SSDs to reduce model loading times.
The Official Documentation
For advanced configuration, tool-specific options and version changes, refer to the official Open WebUI documentation. This guide covers going live on a ServOrbit VPS; the vendor's documentation remains the reference for fine-tuning.
