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.
Please get familiar with your ISP’s TOS before doing that.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I’ve had a seedbox running on it for like a year and it was sick, also had plex and stuff set up. Haven’t used it since mullvad stopped doing port forwarding.
That’s the kind of thing I would expect them to take down before most other misuses.
Yeah probably, I didn’t go crazy with it though since it only has 200gb storage anyway and it’s always been behind a vpn.
For torrenting I just pay for putio and have the minimal 100GB account with a script that rclones everything down to my local storage so it is always freed up. I could probably do something similar on oracle with a vpn, but then I’d have to actually wait for most of the torrents to complete.
I just looked, $10 a month for 100gb? That’s ridiculous.
The storage is mostly irrelevant. I just pull everything down immediately and use them as a bt proxy. Their network effect allows you to get any popular torrents immediately.
Public or private torrents though?
It’s not as detectable as you think. One of the major things most VPS companies tout, is that the data is fully encrypted and private. So they aren’t scanning the files, or the running processes, or anything else about what is being done with the server.
So unless something external to the company is provided, which acts as proof, they won’t shut things down.
