Lot of sales for 4th of july (and ongoing ones) where you can pay $10-$14 for a YEAR of a small cheap VPS. Usually only has 1GB of memory, but that’s plenty to play around with and learn. If nothing else, a good cheap ipv4 you can use for some port forwarding. There are lots of options, but I’ve used racknerd and ethernetservers which have been fine.
I have my own server at home, but I bought two small ones to start learning Ansible with in a risk free way. Eventually plan to redo my main server with a complete Ansible setup, really want to hop on that “infrastructure as code” train.
Another Pro tip:
If you really want to self host and have good internet speeds, then just use a dynamic dns service to point a domain at your home network :)
It’s free minus the power costs. Sure you won’t be able to guarantee availability but for most personal(and friends/family) use it’s more than good enough.
I say this because the reason a lot of people use VPS is because their ISP won’t give them a static IP. You don’t need a static IP.
Cries in ISP-forced NAT
I was right there with you and did a vpn tunnel with cloudflare. Not a perfect solution but it works well for my jellyfin server.
Yeah, but your speed is limited by the tunnel. My ISP has excellent upload speeds otherwise (140 Mbps).
I checked with my ISP, they said they will give me a static IP but it will cost around $15 per month along with my internet cost. I’d rather just get a VPS.
Seriously. Even better when they just turn it on one day without warning because they can’t handle building out infrastructure to suit their growing customer base. Bastards.
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Depends on Canada my cable did not but my fiber bother the ipv4 and 6 change enough that I wrote scripts to update the DNS records.
I had the same IP address for almost four years through Spectrum in Upstate NY, on a residential plan. It changed once. I ended up moving anyway though, so I didn’t get to see how long that one stuck around.
I think it depends on the ISP. In my country (Croatia) most of the ISPs, if not all, change your IP address every 24h no matter what. You can force the IP change when you restart the router so if I restart mine at 2am it will change my IP every day at 2am.
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God, i love how nice everyone is on lemmy right now.
What OS? I run a Linux router that when the IP changes it just updates the DNS record. Worst case I’m down for 5 minutes. But have never noticed anything.
Oh my server is running through cloudflare tunnel so im not affected by ip change at all. Im actually running default ISPs router it’s actually pretty nice and does the job for me.
I’m with BT in the UK and whilst this is somewhat true (as in if we lose power my ip normally changes) my ip does change from time to time for no apparent reason.
I have dynamic DNS set up for my services so it’s not a major pain but I do wish I had a true static IP.
If your domain is registered with cloudflare, they have an amazing tunnelling service that is free to point your domain to your own device at home!
For people who don’t like cloudflare, it’s also possible to self-host your reverse proxy, using e.g.
nginxon the front end, andratholeorfrpfor the reverse tunnel. I usesshif I need a forward proxy too (so outbound requests don’t come from my “real” IP) and that’s not super ideal, but it works.This is of course considerably more difficult than something that’s point-and-click, but for me, using Cloudflare defeats the purpose of self-hosting.
I have built & rebuilt such a setup several times now and it gets better documented every time, soon I’ll release a step by step HOWTO.
Please get familiar with your ISP’s TOS before doing that.
I pay them nearly $100 a month for internet. They can get fucked if they want to dictate what legal things I do with it.
It doesn’t matter how much you pay them. When you signed the contract you accepted their Terms of Service. Of course they can dictate what they want, you are free to go and choose another provider.
Get a free oracle cloud account. 24GB RAM 200GB disk 4 core CPU for free. 5gbps connection, IPv4 and 6. I run all of my stuff that I want running outside of my house there and run everything else on my proxmox cluster.
Friends don’t let friends use Oracle.
I’ve seen a few comments from people who’ve had their Oracle free tier accounts deleted with no warning.
As someone who once had to work with Oracle databases and licensing as a part of their job, i will never willingly use another Oracle product.
ABSOLUTELY THIS. Same. I have to deal with Oracle and their Opera PMS platform which uses Weblogic, 19c, and a variety of other products and it makes me actively want to scream and light things on fire. If I can help it, you won’t catch me using another Oracle product if I can avoid it.
I thought the same thing when I heard about the free tier, but you have to remember that oracle cloud is distant 4th in the cloud race so they are trying to just get people to use their capacity. Oracle and free are rarely used in the same sentence, but I’ve had an instance running for about a year with minimal problems.
Only ARM64
Oh wow this is quite an interesting proposition. Do you have any ideas / suggestions for what could reasonably be run on a box with 1 GB RAM?
Try putting an RSS reader on their like FreshRSS! Or a bookmark manager such as LinkAce! Start your own personal wiki/knowledge base with BookStack! Try deploying them natively, then learn how awesome docker is and put them into a compose file. Add wireguard into the mix so your services can only be accessed via a VPN.
Now get yourself a domain if you don’t already have one. Pro tip if you want to maximize the cheapness of your setup, you can get a .xyz domain for .99 cents a year! Just has to be funny numbers, but find some numbers that has meaning and its not bad. Now that you have a domain, put those bad boys in a subdomain. Tired of those pesky browser errors? Time to setup a reverse proxy and get yourself an HTTPS cert. Caddy is brain dead easy to do this.
I can’t believe in all my searching for cheap domain names that never came up, thank you.
Thank you for the introduction to BookStack, I needed an app for a book/Wiki and that looks great. You use it and like it?
I used it for a bit and enjoyed how well developed it is, but I moved onto something different as I needed something more freeform. If the structure of BookStack works for you, you can’t get much better.
What did you move on to, and what features made you move?
ELI5 what a VPS is?
