Discovered self-hosting world and am ridiculously excited about – here’s my tiny Oracle VPS homelab so far

Hey,

I’m quite new to all of this, but I’ve fallen down the self-hosting rabbit hole over the last few days and I’m having way more fun with it than I expected.

I started with Oracle Cloud because I wanted to see how far I could get using the free resources before buying any hardware in farther future.

Getting an Ampere instance was probably the hardest part. Kept running into the infamous “Out of capacity” situation. Eventually I upgraded the account to Pay As You Go, while still keeping the VM within the free allowance, and that finally allowed me to snag an A1 instance in Sweden Central ( tho Sweden was not the best choice as there seems to be no A2 ampere, but with OC recent changes maybe it doesn't matter that much anyway )

My current VPS is:

Oracle Ampere A1

2 OCPU

12 GB RAM

200 GB storage

Ubuntu 24.04

Current bill so far: €0.00, which still feels slightly magical.

Since then I’ve slowly been building things up rather than just running one giant install script.

So far I have:

Docker + Docker Compose.

Caddy for reverse proxy + automatic HTTPS.

Kavita for books/comics/PDFs.

AIOStreams ( this i wanted for to test out usenet, so this included buying usenet providor and nzb indexer ).

SilverBullet as my proper long-term knowledge base/documentation.

Memos for quick notes and random thoughts.

Backrest/restic for backups.

Backup failure monitoring/notifications with healthcheck.io.

Everything gets its own subdomain, while all the containers themselves are generally bound to localhost and Caddy sits in front of them.

One of the things I’ve enjoyed most is that I’m actually starting to understand what all these pieces do instead of just copying commands etc.

A week ago things like:

DNS, reverse proxy, Docker Compose,YAML, SSH, Caddy etc were mostly just words to me.

Now I can at least look at a Compose file and slightly understand why an app is listening on 127.0.0.1:5230, how Caddy sends memos.example.com to that port, why multiple subdomains can all point to the same VPS IP, etc.

I even started keeping documentation about the VPS inside SilverBullet, including update procedures, backup notes, commands, architecture decisions and things I’ve learned so far. It has become a bit of a self documenting homelab.

My little notes workflow is currently:

Memos for quick thoughts / capture

Karakeep for things I find on the internet

SilverBullet for things worth actually keeping/organising and mainly for knowledgebase.

Karakeep isn't installed yet, but it's high on the list as a digital hoarder been always inside me.

So next things I’m considering are probably:

Uptime Kuma for service monitoring

Karakeep

Homepage / Glance as a nice front door to everything.

( possibly Glances for proper VPS CPU/RAM/disk/network stats )

I know this is probably extremely basic compared with some of the racks, clusters and 100+ container setups people post here, but that’s actually part of what I find epic about self-hosting.

I started with basically no knowledge and a little cloud VM, and suddenly I have my own little corner that I actually understand and control.

I can already see myself going on the dangerously road with thinking like:

“Oh… what else could I self-host?”

So I'm curious: if you were at this stage again, what would you add next and what mistakes would you tell your beginner self to avoid?

Also interested in hearing whether you think Uptime Kuma -> Karakeep -> Homepage is a sensible next order or you’d prioritise something else first.