Hello folks. I recently started trying out self-hosted solutions after stumbling upon this sub. I currently have a contabo VPS subscription on which I was hosting PhotoPrism for photos, Nextcloud for file sync and some other apps which are not critical to my workflow, but I like using.
But these days I hardly step out of the house because of covid and work from home situations. So I was thinking of canceling my VPS subscription to save the monthly cost. I also, through some luck, chanced upon a Synology NAS, which now makes my setup redundant.
However, I would still like to have anywhere access to my files when I do need them sometime in the future. But because my Internet is behind ISP NAT, I can’t directly expose my home network over the Internet. I need a VPS with a static IP for that.
I know that Amazon, Google Cloud, and Oracle cloud all offer some form of free VPS. However, their billing systems are very complicated and the VPS resources are obviously quite small. So I have two questions:
Are any of these services truly free? As in, a free VPS, a static IP address, and domain mapping should be available for free.
Are these VPS, with RAMs sometimes as low as 512 MB, sufficient to run a wireguard tunnel?
Any help and/or suggestions are welcome.
P.S.: I live in a low income country, so VPS subscriptions like Contabo, even though cheap from western perspective, work out to be expensive for me.
I run Nginx Proxy Manager on the free Oracle VPS which reverse-proxies to my services over wireguard tunnels. There are connections to my home server and other VPS. I’m running Nextcloud, piwigo, and several other services and it works fine.
As an alternative to using a VPS, you may want to look into SoftEther as a VPN on your home system as it will punch through most NATs. The software is Opensource out of Japan. The SoftEther team supplies a DDNS server as part of the package, so you don’t need to have a static IP address. I am using it on small servers at a couple sites behind strict NATed firewalls, and it just works and allows me full remote access through their NAT firewalls.
That said, I also use Oracle’s free VPS service as WireGuard VPN servers for myself and family. It works great and I have paid nothing for 18 months of service. Along with the 2 free VPS and 100GB of block storage, they give you 20GB of object storage that you can remotely access.
I suggest to buy a cheap vps just for the tunnel. You may find offer around 10$/y. 1vCore with 512mb ram is ok for a wireguard peer, you can reach 150 Mbps of crypto throughput.
Besides, nothing is free.
You don’t need a VPS and everything is free-to-use. I did install PiVPN (you can choose WG during installation) and threw in DDNS (Dynamic DNS). Works like a charm!
Any tips or guides on this? I’d love to serve content from my home through my VPS so my home IP isn’t exposed. I assume that’s what this would be doing.
If you don’t mind, could you tell guide me a bit on the wireguard setup. I was trying it yesterday and at the end of it, I wasn’t able to ping. I put the configs, created TCP and UDP ingress rules on the VPS, added the IP table entries, and still couldn’t ping it from the client. Anything else I need to do?