My Experience Running a Homelab on Oracle Cloud’s Free VPS
It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post. Recently, I decided to get back into writing and document something I’ve been playing around with: setting up a small homelab environment on an Oracle Cloud Free Tier VPS. As a software engineer, I’ve always been interested in what happens behind the scenes when an application moves from my laptop to an actual server. Things like networking,…
The author recently returned to writing by documenting their experience of setting up a homelab environment on Oracle Cloud's Free Tier VPS. As a software engineer, they were motivated to understand concepts like networking, deployment, Linux, containers, firewalls, and DNS through hands-on experience. The VPS had 1 GB RAM, 1 vCPU, and a public IP address.
The first challenge was running K3s, a lightweight Kubernetes distribution, on the limited resources. After installation, memory usage increased quickly, leaving little room for additional services. The author eventually stopped the K3s server.
Instead, they focused on more realistic tools like Docker containers, Nginx, and iptables firewall configuration. They enjoyed learning about firewall rules and packet filtering with iptables, often asking ChatGPT questions such as "What does this rule actually do?" to improve their understanding. They also set up a web application using Docker and Nginx.
Finally, they connected the web application to a domain using an A record pointing to the VPS's public IP address. This process involved learning about A records, CNAME records, and the differences between www and @ hostnames. The VPS's 1 GB RAM limitation posed a significant challenge, requiring careful resource management.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
