Lot of sales for 4th of july (and ongoing ones) where you can pay $10-$14 for a YEAR of a small cheap VPS. Usually only has 1GB of memory, but that’s plenty to play around with and learn. If nothing else, a good cheap ipv4 you can use for some port forwarding. There are lots of options, but I’ve used racknerd and ethernetservers which have been fine.
I have my own server at home, but I bought two small ones to start learning Ansible with in a risk free way. Eventually plan to redo my main server with a complete Ansible setup, really want to hop on that “infrastructure as code” train.
haha this is amazing, I made similar comments in 3 threads or so, and people commented back about OptiPlex SFF in all of 'em :D
when I first started doing this again for real about 3 years ago, I built a stack of 3x OptiPlex SFF that I got from pcsforpeople.com (discount refurb gear for po’ folk), plus an Amazon refurb. I’ve started migrating to the “1-liter” USFF business PCs, but I still have the best of the OptiPlex SFFs - an i7-4770 with 32GB of RAM which now is my database server and NAS box.
It’s amazing how well the high-end 4xxx Intel chips still hold their own a decade after their release.