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.

  • @[email protected]English
    2•5 hours ago

    Start by learning docker, you don’t have to selfhost anything yet, just learn to run a container, specially to run automated stuff. Then learn to build the images and run docker compose.

    Also you could start checking any form or infrastructure as code. I usually hear about ansible and nixos.
    This helps having a way to redeploy your services in any hardware easily.

    • @marx2kEnglish
      1•4 hours ago

      DevOps guy here mostly working at scale in AWS. Learning docker should be priority 1 alongside learning Linux basics. Ansible should be second IF the plan is launching docker containers on a VM as opposed to a server less option (example: AWS Fargate)

      • AlexanderESmith
        1•1 hour ago

        To be clear; DevOps isn’t a role, it’s a methodology.

        As for docker; Learn Linux fundamentals first. Docker is just automation, and it’s worthless if you don’t understand what you’re automating. Same goes for Ansible.

        IaC is great, but there are too many people who don’t know what the hell their underlying infrastructure does, how different parts talk to reach other, or how to properly manage it, and trying to build a TON of it, hoping that’ll make up for it.

        Bare metal (or a test VM treated as if it were bare metal) first. All other things later.