How to Self-Host MinIO S3-Compatible Object Storage on Contabo VPS with SSL

The Problem with AWS S3 Pricing Complexity

Amazon Web Services S3 charges for storage, PUT requests, GET requests, and punishing egress bandwidth ($0.09 per GB transferred out). A media-rich application serving 5TB of video assets or database snapshots can generate hundreds of dollars in surprise monthly fees. MinIO is a high-performance, Kubernetes-native, S3-compatible object store written in Go that delivers enterprise object storage on your own private infrastructure.

Deploying MinIO with Docker Compose on Contabo Storage VPS

mkdir -p ~/minio/{data,config} && cd ~/minio
nano docker-compose.yml

services:
  minio:
    image: quay.io/minio/minio:latest
    container_name: minio
    restart: always
    command: server /data --console-address ":9001"
    environment:
      - MINIO_ROOT_USER=admin_access_key
      - MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD=SUPER_STRONG_SECRET_PASSWORD
      - MINIO_SERVER_URL=https://s3.yourdomain.com
      - MINIO_BROWSER_REDIRECT_URL=https://console-s3.yourdomain.com
    volumes:
      - ./data:/data
    ports:
      - "127.0.0.1:9000:9000"
      - "127.0.0.1:9001:9001"

docker compose up -d

Securing Behind Nginx Reverse Proxy with TLS

Configure Nginx to route API traffic on port 9000 (s3.yourdomain.com) and web console traffic on port 9001 (console-s3.yourdomain.com) with Let's Encrypt certificates. You can now configure AWS SDKs or WordPress offload media plugins pointing to your custom S3 endpoint.