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.
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.
20 year seasoned admin here; Nevermind not being worth “free”, I wouldn’t use them if they literally paid me to.
My experience as well. Walking in to a network or server consult, and finding Oracle DB, there was immediately a caveat with the customer that I would have nothing to do with that shit or they’d see my backside. Since I knew I would be dealing with it somehow anyway, there was a fuck-you factor in any time quotes I gave them.
I wouldn’t be involved in migrating it to new hardware, and if the consultants they hired to deal with it needed anything, I’d take my own sweet time to get back to them. Gawd, the Oracle consultants were the worst. But my utter hard and fast rule was that I would never, ever talk to Oracle Support.
I’m not saying I wouldn’t join the contract negotiation meeting, but the amount they’d need to fork over would be substantial.
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?
Not for longevity. Oracle can shut it off in a blink for no reason
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.