A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I've been happy with racknerd. They usually run specials that are pretty reasonable: https://www.racknerd.com/NewYear/
I did have one rather long outage of about 48 hours once. The host running my VPS had a nic fail. They got it fixed and it's been solid ever since.
Second racknard. If you Google Black Friday special, you'll find the page where you can order a VPS with four gigs of RAM for something like $50 a year. It's not a 12-month special either, you can renew it year after year.
I run docker containers there, a Red Dead redemption 2 server, etc. It's really useful commodity server to have around,
3rd racknerd -- but I just use the cheapest KVM deal in the geographic region I need it in. About $10/yr for single core older Xeons with 768M-1G RAM. Still though I've been very happy with them.
Is that enough resource to use as a VPN?
Works for me just fine but it doesn't see more than 3 users at a time if that.
Silly question but isn’t using a VPS the exact opposite of “self hosted”?
This is one of those things where I think that purity might conflict with progress. I am currently using a VPS in a privacy-friendly country to host some stuff, and I am trying to move more of my needs there. I can easily try to host things at my house(and I do to a limited extent, I have a VPN I run through a VPS to connect my devices together to accomplish this), but dealing with the constraints of non-professional hardware management and a residential internet connection is frustrating. This frustration has in the past prevented me from reducing my use of services where I know they are farming my data, and would probably honor illegal and warrant-less data requests from government agencies. At least with IaaS, I give them money in exchange for a virtual machine, vs SaaS where I give them possibly money but more importantly permission to do whatever they want with my highly structured data(far easer to data mine a easily searchable database of PII vs a filesystem of unknown structure).
Even outside of tech, I have often found that my sense of purity gets in the way of actually making progress towards my values. Use the VPS if it will get you to stop using worse things.
You can get a quad core ARM 24 gb ram vpn for free on oracle cloud on their free tier.
It seems permanently unavailable, how did you get an instance?
Oracle Free Tier. Works like a charm for me for 2 years. Really free, really working. No matter what shit company Oracle is.
Just a PSA, never ever EVER request deletion of an Oracle free tier if there is any possibility you might want one in the future.
You can delete/remove instances or whatever as you desire, but you won't be able to get a second free tier account even if the first is completely deleted.