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.

  • @hperrin
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    13 hours ago

    You can buy a super cheap cloud VM and use a (self hosted) VPN so it can access your own PC and a reverse proxy to forward all incoming requests to your own PC behind your school’s network.

    It’s arguable whether this would violate their policy, since you are technically hosting something, but not accessible on the internet from their IP. So if you wanna be safe, don’t do this, otherwise, that could help you get started.

    • burghler
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      23 hours ago

      Spending 💰 is not the college student way.

      • @hperrin
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        12 hours ago

        The cheapest one I know of is about $8 a month, so it should be affordable, even on a tight budget.