Here I would like to briefly show you the technology behind this website or the hosting of it. With the help of Oracle Cloud Free Tiers, I have created an environment that allows me to host my web projects and services and try my hand at new things.
The Domain
First and foremost, I looked for a free domain. The .de domain of my last name was unfortunately already taken, so I secured an .io domain from IONOS. The .io domain is quite popular among computer scientists, so I was not averse to it. The whole process at IONOS, about registration, payment, setup and linking with the Oracle Cloud was very easy and fast, I had prepared myself for much more effort.
The Oracle Cloud
Oracle offers a free cloud environment with Oracle Cloud Free Tier. With up to 4 CPU cores, 24GB of RAM and 200GB of disk space perfect for hosting your own small projects and getting to grips with the cloud. Setting up the VM with Ubuntu 22 was very simple and quick, connecting to the VM with PuTTY and the SSH key created was a breeze. Storing the SSH key in PuTTY when saving the session allows for a double-click to connect to the VM, almost making it feel like I’m working on my local network.
Setting up Docker and Traefik
Since I already had good experiences with Docker in the work environment as well, I decided to use it again. To be able to publish my different web applications over different subdomains, I decided to use Traefik. Traefik is a powerful reverse proxy that allows me to manage my applications through a single interface and make them smoothly accessible. I followed U-Labs’ instructions for setup and installation. This also gave me automatic SSL certificates with Let’s Encrypt for my subdomains right away.
Adding services
By setting up with Docker and Traefik, it is now very easy for me to take more services online. To do this, I just need to set the appropriate environment variables in my docker-compose.yml file. Traefik then automatically detects the new service and creates the appropriate subdomains. So I already added this blog and my CO2 monitor API, I’m sure there will be a blog entry about the latter project soon.
Conclusion
Creating your own cloud environment was really easier than I thought. The domain doesn’t cost a fortune and the Oracle Cloud Free Tier is really free. Setting up the other services was no problem either, just like on the home computer. I look forward to more projects that I can implement in my cloud environment. That’s it for today! I am always open for comments, questions and feedback, feel free to contect me on XING or LinkedIn for that!