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.
this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2024
24 points (96.2% liked)
Selfhosted
39840 readers
461 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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.
I’ve heard others recommend Low End Box before but I have no experience, so do some due diligence before selecting any of these!
I would second LET. They usually have a lot of good offers around Black Friday, you can get a pretty decent VPS for like $10-20 / year.
You can keep an eye out for that, and see if this is really what you want to get into: https://lowendtalk.com/categories/offers
It is like a marketplace, so make sure to check reviews of the host provider before buying - which you can find on the same site.
Have a look at gullo.me, their entry level vps was just $2 or something.
Edit: https://hosting.gullo.me/pricing (apparently the cheapest is $3.5 - annually)
Super easy things you can do as exercises and take no serious resources:
- build a static site and host it locally
- host your music collection
- host your video collection
- setup the *arr stack
- setup home assistant for your dorm room
If you're into developing and stuff, GitLab
Plex server
Jellyfin server
ELK stack or security onion
Get steam working, connect via steam link.
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.)
My brother in Christ, Oracle isn't worth free.
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.
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.
I was just thinking about my free oracle server if it would be good for my own lemmy instance?
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.
Not for longevity. Oracle can shut it off in a blink for no reason