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.
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.
For me, something like PiHole for DNS-based Adblocking, as well as potentially a Wireguard/OpenVPN installation (via PiVPN potentially) for an easy adblocking VPN combination. Depends on the available bandwidth, however, but some lower powered applications, even up to a small personal Matrix Synapse server could be viable on 1GB Ram if not abused.
If you’re thinking of hosting Matrix on that small of a server consider going with Conduit or Dendrite. They’re not as feature complete as Synapse but they’re substantially lighter.
It’s also obviously a different thing than Matrix, but Prosody for XMPP is suuuuper lightweight.
