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.
Cries in ISP-forced NAT
I was right there with you and did a vpn tunnel with cloudflare. Not a perfect solution but it works well for my jellyfin server.
https://www.cloudflare.com/products/tunnel/
Yeah, but your speed is limited by the tunnel. My ISP has excellent upload speeds otherwise (140 Mbps).
I checked with my ISP, they said they will give me a static IP but it will cost around $15 per month along with my internet cost. I’d rather just get a VPS.
Seriously. Even better when they just turn it on one day without warning because they can’t handle building out infrastructure to suit their growing customer base. Bastards.