Self Hosting Through A CGNAT For Free Part 2: How to setup your a free VPS

Intro

This is for those of you who have gotten started on their dreams of self-hosting anything, only to be thwarted by CGNAT. want a VPS no cost without worrying to much about switching providers after your free trial ends.

The Main Providers are all Free, for a little bit

Azure does it, AWS does it, DigitalOcean does it, so does Google. The trick is finding one that will be always free. Google’s micro tier has a free plan! So we’re going to use Google. If you just signed up, they also give you $300 in credits to spend over your first three months, after which you’ll have to give financial details. Don’t worry, as long as you stay within their Free plan, you won’t be charged. Read More Here

Creating a new VM in Google Cloud

Acquiring a domain

Configuring it in Cloudflare

You don’t need to buy Static IPs

Free Tier VM’s come with public-facing ephemeral ips. That means they’re able to talk to the internet! So, technically we can set up our server or vpn or whatever. But it’s not a permanent or elegant solution. Whenever your VM is spun up, and sometimes when it’s restarted, its ip will refresh. This means it will lose contact with everything it’s supposed to talk to. You have a few options: Setting up DDNS (which is trivial with afraid.org domains if you’re going the totally-free route), Updating everything manually whenever you notice the site is down, or setting up some kind of automation. In my case, I built an ansible playbook that would update my homeserver, the VPS, and Cloudflare records whenever the homeserver loses contact with the VPS. It’s much too overkill to show you THAT approach, so I’ll let you in on a little secret– Cloudflare also offers DDNS for free by way of a lightweight service called ddclient.