David

Here’s a 60-day free trial to tinker with as well: https://www.linode.com/tux

I’m currently self hosting:

• Jellyfin: TV shows for kiddos
• Minetest: gaming with kiddos
• Supertuxkart: more gaming with kiddos
• Pi-hole: DNS with several filters
• Tiny Tiny RSS: feed reader
• Nextcloud: phone sync and project management
• Gitea: code tracking and version control
• JSketcher: CAD drawing
• Stable Diffusion: AI art

The last two are local-network only and the most recent additions; still just tinkering with them at this point.

My favorite of the list is probably TT-RSS which I use for podcasts and to keep tabs on a few sub-reddits I had participated in before moving to Lemmy.

Cool concept! And congrats on getting it up and running :)

Yeah, bigger solutions like Azure, AWS, etc. have some cool features especially for scaling but… that comes with its own headaches.

For earlier stages I personally much prefer a simple VPS where I can freely do what I want with it including total wipes, snapshots / rollbacks, etc.

If you’re comfortable working on a local VM then perhaps a VPS such as Linode or Digital Ocean would be a good place to start; they’re essentially VMs hosted in cloud you have total control of so you can install whatever you want just like a local VM. Even the cheapest VPS option is plenty for this sort of testing.

These have free trials too such as: https://www.linode.com/tux

yt-dl for videos

Or the fork yt-dlp