Plus one to this. It’s super nice separating concerns in this way.

there was no easy way to do it on a reasonably sized machine.

Why? What is the issue?

They are for sure talking about the ARM servers from Oracle. You get 24gb of memory and 4 cpu cores that you can carve into virtual machines.

Issue is that the free stock is very limited, and there have been some claims of people having their free service resources reclaimed by Oracle.

Still, if you can get one, it is probably the best you can get for free.

I use a VPS from RackNerd for all kinds of things (my personal Lemmy, for one). Have had it for two and a half years or so with no complaints.