this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
32 points (97.1% liked)

Selfhosted

55101 readers
431 users here now

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.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

  7. No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm wondering if university email allow you to get free server that you could try self hosting on it on any service

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] tburkhol@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

In the old days, university IT put essentially no access controls on their networks, so students' dorm computers were completely exposed to the internet. Any service you started was immediately, globally accessible. Some big sites, including slashdot and facebook, got their start in some kid's dorm room. I feel like access controls really got going in the early 00's - first for residential, then for broader campus.

Check with your IT people - they may have policy or conditions under which they will expose ports on your personal computer to the internet. Otherwise, your best bet is probably free-tier AWS or Oracle.

Not free, but there are some 'KVM VPS' providers out there that will rent you a small, internet exposed computer pretty cheap. They can be a good platform for experimenting with self-hosting services, without exposing your personal equipment or home network. eg: 1CPU/1GB RAM/24GB SSD $12/year https://my.racknerd.com/cart.php?a=add&pid=903

[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

In the old days, university IT put essentially no access controls on their networks, so students' dorm computers were completely exposed to the internet

Dorm ethernet works this way for me right now. It's how I host some stuff. I only get 100 mb/s per port though. I've bonded two ports to get 200 total.