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.

  • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
    81·
    18 days ago

    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.)

    • variants@possumpat.ioEnglish
      1·
      18 days ago

      I was just thinking about my free oracle server if it would be good for my own lemmy instance?

      • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
        2·
        17 days ago

        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.