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.
For people who don’t like cloudflare, it’s also possible to self-host your reverse proxy, using e.g.
nginxon the front end, andratholeorfrpfor the reverse tunnel. I usesshif I need a forward proxy too (so outbound requests don’t come from my “real” IP) and that’s not super ideal, but it works.This is of course considerably more difficult than something that’s point-and-click, but for me, using Cloudflare defeats the purpose of self-hosting.
I have built & rebuilt such a setup several times now and it gets better documented every time, soon I’ll release a step by step HOWTO.