Terrarium on Hostinger

WARNING

We do not recommend Hostinger for the primary Terrarium use case. Terrarium works best with a separate block volume for the ZFS pool, snapshots, and the local time-machine history. Hostinger's VPS docs do not document attachable block-volume support, so you are usually forced into --storage-mode file on the root disk. That works, but it is a compromise rather than the preferred setup.

Official references:

• How to Use the VPS Dashboard in Hostinger
• How to Use SSH Keys at Hostinger VPS
• Available Operating Systems for VPS at Hostinger
• Parameters and Limits of Hosting Plans in Hostinger
• How to Increase VPS Partition Size at Hostinger
• How to Use Hostinger API CLI
• Getting Started With the Hostinger Terraform Provider

Important limitation

Hostinger’s official VPS docs do not document independently attachable block storage volumes for VPS instances.

What the official docs do document:

• fixed disk capacity as part of the VPS plan
• plan upgrades when you need more disk
• expanding the existing partition after a plan upgrade

Because of that, Hostinger is not the ideal provider for Terrarium’s recommended disk mode. The clean Hostinger path is usually:

• choose a larger VPS plan up front
• use plain Ubuntu 24.04
• install Terrarium with --storage-mode file

Console flow

1. Create a VPS in hPanel.
2. Choose a plain Ubuntu 24.04 template.
3. Add your SSH key during onboarding, or later in VPS -> Manage -> Settings -> SSH keys.
4. SSH into the VPS.
5. Install Terrarium in file mode.

Example install:

curl -fsSL https://github.com/terion-name/terrarium/releases/latest/download/install.sh | bash -s -- \
  --email admin@your-domain.tld \
  --acme-email certs@your-domain.tld \
  --idp local \
  --storage-mode file \
  --storage-size 150G

If you later upgrade the VPS plan for more disk, Hostinger documents expanding the existing partition after the resize.

CLI note

Hostinger does publish an official CLI, hapi, and an official API. Their current support docs cover:

• installing the CLI
• authenticating with an API token
• common VM operations such as list, get, start, and stop

Documented commands:

hapi --help
hapi vps vm list
hapi vps vm get <vm_id>
hapi vps vm start <vm_id>
hapi vps vm stop <vm_id>

The current official support article does not document end-to-end VPS creation through hapi, so for Terrarium provisioning the most reliable documented path is still hPanel plus SSH.