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.
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.
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)