Would you believe Oracle OCI? They have an always free tier, as in you never pay. You need a valid regular credit card. At first I thought it was for a slow x86 instance, but it includes Arm hours equivalent to 4 cores, 24 GB RAM, 10TB of transfer a month, I think 200GB storage. Divide it up for an nginx reverse proxy in front of it, or HA Proxy if you are feeling ambitious.
I use Linux, so encryption is easy with LUKS, and Free File Sync to drives that rotate to a safety deposit box at the bank for catastrophic event, such as a house fire. Usually anything from the last few months are still on my mobile devices.
When people come over for dinner, I explain to them if the food is too hot, to spit it out and avoid suffering severe burns. They are like, thanks but I’m not stupid, which is a great setup for a story:
So my friend shoves a huge forkful of baked potato I serve into his mouth. Days later, his dentist asked why didn’t he just spit it out as he removes rotting flesh from his mouth.
Not knowing about Incus (LXD). It’s a life changer. Would never run any service on bare metal again.
Using GenAI to develop my Terraform and Ansible playbooks is magical. Also, use it to document everything in beautiful HTML docs from the outputs. Amazing.