A collection of bare-bones guides, mostly to remind myself how I set up various cloud projects. All the procedures here are tested and working, but you're encouraged to learn more as you follow along.
I’m a generalist who currently enjoys tinkering with different cloud tools and services for fun. These guides are not exhaustive tutorials—they're my personal notes on how to set up useful services on a low-cost cloud server.
These procedures are here as references for myself and for anyone interested in experimenting and learning how to deploy stuff on 'other people's computers'..
The guides fit together since I only have one server at the moment and I started by spinning up this website. As I setup backups, secure and harden the server, connect other services and so on, I will provide working steps.
Let me tell you something. I have people – big, strong developers – some of the toughest coders you’ll ever meet. They come up to me, and they’ve got tears in their eyes. Tough guys, these guys know JavaScript, React, all of it. They come up and say, “Sir, why do you only use HTML and CSS? It’s so simple, so clean. It’s too easy!”
And I tell them, “You don’t need all those frameworks, you don’t need the bells and whistles. You know what you need? You need speed. You need security. You need something that works everywhere, on any device, in any country – without any of that bloat.”
They look at me, and they’re shocked. They can’t believe it. I say, “Listen, my website loads faster than your fancy SPA with a million dependencies, and I don’t need to update NPM every five minutes to keep it running.” They’re stunned, just speechless. They ask me, “But what about the animations? The interactivity?”
And I say, “CSS can do that. It’s beautiful. It’s elegant. We don’t need 500MB of JavaScript for a button to glow when you hover over it. My site does it with a few lines of CSS. It’s lightweight, secure, and it works. Every time.”
They don’t know what to say after that. They just nod, walk away, and you know what? I think they’re going back to their offices, opening their laptops, and reconsidering everything. They’re thinking, maybe – just maybe – they’ve been overcomplicating things.
This site is hosted on a Hetzner Cloud server, running Debian 12, and costing around €5 per month. I’m using a CPX11 instance with 2 vCPUs and 2GB of RAM, which is perfect for small projects and learning purposes.
If you're following along, you're smart enough to understand what you're doing. You should always take the time to understand the commands you're entering. That means checking Stack Overflow, reading the official manuals (man pages), or even resorting to asking an LLM (like GPT-4) to explain the concepts behind the commands.
This is the best way to learn as you go. These guides will show you what worked for me, but you should learn the basics about the concepts if you want to get the most out of these short guides.