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I have no job, so the gift cards I have are prepaid and only have a few dollars on them. I should get a job soon, but in the meantime, I want to run my own Lemmy instance. I know this is probably a stupid question, but is there a way to do so? If I run it on just my computer, it’ll shut down when my computer turns off, and there is an old computer my parents have but they won’t let me use it because they don’t wanna buy a new charger (The charger cord is broken)

Oracle Cloud isn’t available in my location by the way, and I tried Google Cloud, it keeps crashing when I do an instance and it wants me to pay all of a sudden.

I tried freevps.edu.pl but that won’t work either, it leaves my VPS on pending no matter what I do

I wouldn’t start with anything involving user-generated content… Otherwise, it could easily be misused, and the police might end up at YOUR door.

Thanks

I might

1) Get new equipment and always run my old computer

2) Get a Raspberry Pi

3) Keep running my new computer forever

That’s not the point. For example, I use Raspberries as an ad blocker, file server, Nextcloud, private (!!!) web server, and VPN.

I wouldn’t run ANYTHING on them that’s publicly accessible….

Imagine if two users used it to share child pornography, for example… Then your life is completely screwed as the middleman..

Or malware gets distributed through it… Or your entire network gets hacked…

Quickly dismiss the idea of setting up something like Lemmy or whatever on your own network. The world is a shitty place… which means it’s not a question of if something will happen, but WHEN

Pi is a good option because of it’s low power draw.

However I find used mini pc’s and Small Form Factor desktops to be a better value and their idle power is similar to the latest Pi (while costing about the same as a new Pi).

I wouldn’t let that be a deterrent to starting an instance. Just make sure you understand the obligations you have as site owner when it comes to misuse. Maintain good logging and follow legal requirements (which in the US is locking down and preserving evidence and reporting to law enforcement hotlines - depending on the nature of the misuse).

Start with experimenting on your own computer. You can install Docker and setup Lemmy fx. Any reason you can’t keep your computer running?

There’s only IONOS with their £1 and £2 server: https://www.ionos.co.uk/servers/vps

Ahhhhh, I get it now. Thanks :) In the meantime, I will just run communities on other instances, like my Scandinavian Left-Wing politics community on the PieFed instance I use!

Strato has one Euro a per month Linux VPS plan (1GB RAM, 10 GB disk) which you pay per quarter, so that’s three Euros, four times per year. You can use a swapfile in case the lack of RAM would be a problem.

This is on their Spanish language site but also available in German language and more (see at the bottom of their pages).

https://www.strato.es/servidores/vps-linux

I know of a few VPS that are ‘free’, and I use that word quite loosely. Long time back I explored a few, and I can tell you that they are not the time of day. Very cheap VPS can be had. I had one that ran me $25 USD per year. It wasn’t the most thread rippin’ VPS you could have, but it certainly was cheap, and at one time I had about 25 different containers running on it with out much trouble. A good place to look for cheap VPS is at lowendbox.com.

Oracle offers a free tier, but you really have to watch your consumption of resources, and I believe they require a credit card to open an account. There are horror stories of people who went over the limit and ended up with a good size bill

I realize $25 USD is not free and does not fit withing your request, and I empathize. As far as using your own computer with something like Docker, and shutting it down each evening….I shut my server down every evening via a cron job. I am the only user, and I just couldn’t justify letting it run while I slept. So I guess you’d say it’s an intermittent service.

Just to add to your comment:

As much as I hate oracle, I run their free-tier vps in a Canadian datacenter and it never required my cc. I think it’s geographic location-dependent.

and it never required

That’s cool. I was thinking one of the free tiers like Amazon, Google required a CC to open one. Side question: What do you run on Oracle, and how fastidious do you have to be about controlling resource consumption? I’ve read about people on one of the free tiers getting socked a big bill, in fact it’s a meme now.

::: spoiler spoiler https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/df5270a2-2e8b-491c-a65d-663c667d66c0.jpeg :::

I just wanna say that Lemmy isn’t exactly light on resources. 4GB of RAM are barely enough, even on a single user instance. I don’t think free tiers will offer more

Laws are changing rapidly right now, and it’s practically impossible to keep up with everything. If, for example, files are shared or links to them are posted, things get very tricky. For instance, would you know what to do with *.stl files? Something unpleasant is coming soon regarding 3D printing in Europe https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/02/26/brussels-seeks-eu-wide-jail-sentences-for-firearms-offences-including-3d-printed-weapons You’d have to automatically check such files or see if anything links to them. You shouldn’t host such things on your own network. At least that’s my opinion.

Oracle does it.

No, that’s not how the new EU legislation works. The new laws build off existing Digital Services Act (DSA) and legacy E-Commerce Directive (2000/31/EC) requirements. The DSA states again that you would have to lock down access to the material (once you become aware) and then inform authorities.

All site operators maintain safe harbor with EU authorities unless those two points are broken. In both US and EU pending legislation, no requirement to scan all STLs is required, so you do not have to automatically check all files like you mentioned.

don’t have an old pc lying around? I literally built my first server while I was jobless, (I did purchase HDDs when I was employed, though). That same server has a cpu, mobo, ram and case that are well over 15 years old now, only the PSU and storage are new.

I’m hosting a discord alternative called sharkord. Initially I just hosted it on my home server, but I couldn’t open ports for voice chat so I did move to a VPS with akami (linode). At most it’s costing me $5 CAD a month.

It’s wayyy lighter to run compared to lemmy, because servers aren’t federated. I know, different application, but just wanted to provide a point of reference.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

[Thread #183 for this comm, first seen 22nd Mar 2026, 20:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Looks like you’re in Norway, so I suggest you reach out in norge.chat (matrix) and see if anybody can suggest something, perhaps a local provider or community of people with similar interests.

I’m in america, i just know some norwegian :)

Racknerd always has good deals. You get get a vps for as low as $11/year.

Here’s a link (no affiliation with them. Been using them since 2020 when I grabbed one of these deals)

https://www.racknerd.com/BlackFriday/

(Don’t worry that it says black Friday. You should still be able to get the deal)

2nd for the OCI free tier. Guide, check out their Stremio guide too.

Not quite the same thing, but maybe run a Hollos instance instead? Yet to test, but supposedly it runs on your phone by what they market.

Also seen two other minimalist projects implementing ActivityPub. Let me see if I can find them.

I’d love that!

If I get a job, I would love that. I should get one soon, thanks!

You’re welcome!

Checking here, Hollos still needs a site to use as relay, similar to Bluesky, so I’m guessing you’d need to either host the site on your machine, or to use a VPS. I need to study and test it further though.

Anyways, here’s the links: - Hollos: https://holos.social/ - One of the softwares I had found: https://lemmy.manganiello.tech/post/303332 - The other software I’m still looking

I only run two instances, both run nginx and static HTML sites (plus all the stupid mandatory bits like fail2ban, python for ansible, certbot, etc. They are very low usage and get no seo or anything so they are really, really low usage.

I’ve never been warned about resources so far, and it’s been 3 years. I intensionally don’t run any high-bandwidth stuff like a matrix server or file sync for that reason.

I just lock it right down with keys and firewall entries for SSH. Logs are pretty quiet, except for llm scraping, but they are rate-limited, so they go away quickly.

Be aware that Oracle presents image “shapes” as the os images for use,which include oracle, Ubuntu, and a few others. These do have oracle metrics gathering and agents installed to help with migration between data centre zones, so it’s conceivable that they can read what’s on the os. I don’t have any PII on there except public keys and my email address.

Be wary of oracle free tier. They’re known to just delete your vps for no reason.

oracle also is in the process of destroying cnn and any free press as well as make sure every citizen is being watched and their data is stored on oracle servers.

@atheqtpie@piefed.blahaj.zone two things I just thought of.

First, it needs an initial investment, but maybe buy a Raspberry Pi or some other single-board computer to put your site/sites on?

Second, in a post asking about self-hosting that I made, someone suggested the site https://linuxupskillchallenge.org, and reading its “what is it about” page, I see the text from the attached image. Perhaps worth investigating.

Thanks! Perfect, I’ll check it out

Any specific reason you want to run a Lemmy instance? Or just trying something new?

What’s the end goal?

Google only gives you about $100 to start with

Skip the pie as it is really terrible for the money you are spending

Instead, find a old workstation and setup Linux.

Remnode does really cheap instances, but you’re not running Lemmy on their basement tier.

Fair, thanks!