What would tools/services would you recommend for hosting without self hosting?
Hello.
I've been trying to get familiar with self hosting. The only roadblock I have is I'm unable to do so because I am a university student living in student accommodation where it is against WiFi policy to host anything. And currently I don't even have my raspberry pi with me. My laptop is relatively low specced, so I can't exactly do VMs, but I want to learn more about hosting stuff and the services I can host. I recently signed up for a free managed Nextcloud instance because I wanted to see what it's like and whether I'd be interested in hosting my own.
I know VPS-es are an option but they can get pretty costly, especially for a student like me. Do you have any recommendations, including any cheapz reliable VPS-es for a UK student to dip his toes into self-hosting? Thank you.
P.S I know this isn't exactly self-hosting as I'm technically reliant on third party hardware but it's the only option in my situation.
I completely forgot about the Linux Upskill Challenge! I should have mentioned I've been running Linux as my desktop operating system for almost 3 years, and I've been tinkering with it quite a lot throughout so I'm quite familiar and very comfortable with the command line. I shoukd go through the Linux upskill challenge so I can fill in any knowledge gaps though. Thanks for reminding me!
You can buy a super cheap cloud VM and use a (self hosted) VPN so it can access your own PC and a reverse proxy to forward all incoming requests to your own PC behind your school’s network.
It’s arguable whether this would violate their policy, since you are technically hosting something, but not accessible on the internet from their IP. So if you wanna be safe, don’t do this, otherwise, that could help you get started.
I think it's cool you're trying to find ways to get into this. If the goal is to learn, why not deploy the services on your laptop? They won't be available when the computer is off of course, but you would still get the full experience. Even a low-spec laptop will be better than a cheap VPS.
The worst laptop you can find could probably be better than even a reasonably specced VPS. Low end VPS are dire, and you can get some pretty decent laptops for almost nothing. If it’s pre 8th Gen. Intel they’re basically worthless on the used market. But they’ll still easily get the job done.
If you have a credit card and can pass their validation, Oracle offers a shockingly good set of free cloud options.
4 core, 24gb ram ARM instance, two potato epyc instances, 200gb of disk space and 10tb of transfer and various other little bits and pieces for the grand total of $0.
Some people have had their accounts closed for "no reason", but I'm closing in on 2 years of free shit with no problems, so ymmv.
(I strongly suspect no reason has a reason and a huge number of these people were running VPNs, so I'd wager they either did something stupid/illegal, or someone they gave access to did something stupid/illegal.)
Not sure if the UK is similar to where I lived, but they were the worst “cloud” provider I’ve ever used. Want to shut down the instance you had to recreate it with a different OS? Good luck getting it back online as they are out of capacity. Also, if you accidentally deleted one of the default network components it was impossible to recreate it without incurring a cost kind of going against anything you learned about cloud computing and “infrastructure as code”. It was a glorified GUI.
Edit: I’m just glad my current employer does not use anything oracle as their support is also famously bad.
They couldn't even successfully delete my account or stop billing me after they couldn't fix the simplest problem because they could never associate my support ID with my tenant account. I had to put a block on my credit card at the advice of a oracle support rep to stop getting charged.
Utter dogshit, but I don't know what I expected, doing any sort of business with Larry Ellison.
Mine's running just fine (along with about a dozen other things) on the A1/ARM instance you can get for free.
I wouldn't say performance is stunningly good - the Ampere cores aren't especially fast single threaded, and postgres is.... well, it's not the most threaded thing ever under really low loads - but it does what it's supposed to.