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·
      17 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.

  • smpl@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    2·
    17 days ago

    It’s easy to overlook with the omnipresent internet, but self-hosting doesn’t require internet. You could host for your fellow students on the local network. If that’s also against the Wifi rules you can either ignore that stupid rule or set up your own god damn wifi with hostapd on your machine and let students connect directly to it. It’s probably best to use a machine dedicated to the task for security reasons as you wouldn’t want curious students to accidentally erase your homework. I wouldn’t use containers or VMs for any of this, I’d just use bare metal like in the good ol’ days. You could also, without having to worry, give people shell accounts because it’s a closed network. The options are endless without all the worries of hosting on the internet.

    • theshatterstone54@feddit.ukOPEnglish
      2·
      17 days ago

      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!

  • pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.devEnglish
    2·
    17 days ago

    Start by learning docker, you don’t have to selfhost anything yet, just learn to run a container, specially to run automated stuff. Then learn to build the images and run docker compose.

    Also you could start checking any form or infrastructure as code. I usually hear about ansible and nixos.
    This helps having a way to redeploy your services in any hardware easily.