[frankjr]

While I completely understand the allure of running on your own hardware, if you just want a cheap server to host a personal page or similar, you cannot beat Scaleway's Stardust VM instances. For less than 2 EUR a month you get 1 vCPU, 1 GB of RAM, 1 IPv4+IPv6 address, 10GB of storage and unlimited traffic. They claim up-to 100Mbps bandwidth but I regularly get much more than that. This sounds like a commercial but I'm just really happy with the service.

[ringworld]

https://www.scaleway.com/en/stardust-instances/

I am not a fan of the lottery approach and being told you're lucky to do business with them.

[randomluck040]

The lottery approach pissed me off so bad, I decided to leave Scaleway altogether. They also aren’t upfront about their contingents. I wanted to try out an M1 instance and before registering and putting my credit card info in, it seemed like it’d be all fine, I just have to put in cc info. I did, they told me there are no instances available. The fair way would be to be upfront about it in my opinion.

[xuki]

Hetzner might have M1 mac available:

https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/mac-mini-m1

[frankjr]

I understand it more like a struggle to keep up it the demand for these instances and this was their attempt to "gamify" it.

[phone[phone]]

It's clear this service is a social media psyop and the GP poster mentioning it is in on it.

[mike_d]

It isn't a lottery as much as an availability constraint.

First you have a limit of 1 stardust per datacenter per customer. Second, they only spin up a fixed number of new stardust servers per day.

It is a loss leader just like in any other business. They are losing money on one instance to get you in the door and you realize their other services are awesome.

[lizknope]

You can find a lot of cheap VM instances at this site. I use buyvm.net and I've been happy with them the last 5 years.

https://lowendbox.com/

[xg15]

I think local hardware makes sense for LAN-only sites - e.g. a company wiki, a media center or a file storage with web interface.

For anything that is supposed to be visible on the internet, I'd always use a hosted server - if nothing else, because I really don't want to open an ingress into my personal home network, even if my ISP permitted that.

For use-cases were you have to handle certain incoming requests even though your setup is mostly LAN-only otherwise (webhooks, ACME, adding some dashboard you can access from your phone...), services like PageKite[1] sound promising.

[1] http://pagekite.net/

[elcritch]

That pagekite looks handy! I’ve recently got gigabit fiber at home but my routers ipv6 firewall is crap. This seems easier than just making a custom vpn to a cloud instance.

[trees101]

an Argo tunnel is even easier. You can even get it for free; https://noise.getoto.net/2019/06/15/a-free-argo-tunnel-for-y...

[xg15]

It seems to be what Mozilla IoT/WebThings uses under the hood. So that's at least one credential :)

I stumbled over the service by trying to understand how the WebThings gateway was supposed to work.

https://iot.mozilla.org/docs/gateway-getting-started-guide.h...

https://github.com/WebThingsIO/registration_server/blob/mast...

[gurchik]

I would recommend Racknerd as well. Not affiliated with them except a happy customer. I pay $36/yr for my 2 GB memory, 2 vCPU, 50 GB SSD VPS that I run Nextcloud on. I also have a $16/yr VPS with 1.5 GB memory and 30 GB SSD for K3s

[GekkePrutser]

Interesting. I hadn't heard of them. Their yearly prices are excellent.

Not unlimited data though. But I'll keep them on my list, thanks

[jcun4128]

I've been using OVH VPSs for a long time.