If you have a credit card and can pass their validation, Oracle offers a shockingly good set of free cloud options.

4 core, 24gb ram ARM instance, two potato epyc instances, 200gb of disk space and 10tb of transfer and various other little bits and pieces for the grand total of $0.

Some people have had their accounts closed for "no reason", but I'm closing in on 2 years of free shit with no problems, so ymmv.

(I strongly suspect no reason has a reason and a huge number of these people were running VPNs, so I'd wager they either did something stupid/illegal, or someone they gave access to did something stupid/illegal.)

It's easy to overlook with the omnipresent internet, but self-hosting doesn't require internet. You could host for your fellow students on the local network. If that's also against the Wifi rules you can either ignore that stupid rule or set up your own god damn wifi with hostapd on your machine and let students connect directly to it. It's probably best to use a machine dedicated to the task for security reasons as you wouldn't want curious students to accidentally erase your homework. I wouldn't use containers or VMs for any of this, I'd just use bare metal like in the good ol' days. You could also, without having to worry, give people shell accounts because it's a closed network. The options are endless without all the worries of hosting on the internet.

Super easy things you can do as exercises and take no serious resources:

• build a static site and host it locally
• host your music collection
• host your video collection
• setup the *arr stack
• setup home assistant for your dorm room

Start by learning docker, you don't have to selfhost anything yet, just learn to run a container, specially to run automated stuff. Then learn to build the images and run docker compose.

Also you could start checking any form or infrastructure as code. I usually hear about ansible and nixos.
This helps having a way to redeploy your services in any hardware easily.

I think it's cool you're trying to find ways to get into this. If the goal is to learn, why not deploy the services on your laptop? They won't be available when the computer is off of course, but you would still get the full experience. Even a low-spec laptop will be better than a cheap VPS.

Google "Oracle always free tier". and go through this course https://programming.dev/post/12147665

Build anything small into a container on your laptop, push it to DockerHub or the Github package registry then host it on fly.io for free.

I’ve heard others recommend Low End Box before but I have no experience, so do some due diligence before selecting any of these!

https://lowendbox.com/blog/1-vps-1-usd-vps-per-month/

You can buy a super cheap cloud VM and use a (self hosted) VPN so it can access your own PC and a reverse proxy to forward all incoming requests to your own PC behind your school’s network.

It’s arguable whether this would violate their policy, since you are technically hosting something, but not accessible on the internet from their IP. So if you wanna be safe, don’t do this, otherwise, that could help you get started.