I recently deployed a couple of services on a VM in the cloud so I could get my feet wet when it comes to self-hosting apps for my own personal use. So far, it's been pretty fun but also frustrating at times; I figured I'd document everything I've done up until now so it's easier for me when I migrate to a different server at some point in the future.

While doing some routine maintenance on a society server running Ubuntu (I'm a sysadmin for my university's computer and networking society), I noticed that its system clock had drifted away from the true time by approximately 20 minutes. This amount of drift isn't something one would expect to see on a long-running server with an active NTP service ... except, of course, the NTP service wasn't working.

A few months ago, one of NetSoc's committee members built an r/place clone just for NetSoc's members, and we figured it would be nice to have a Discord bot to periodically take screenshots of the pixel art website and post updates to our server. When I volunteered to make it (because why not?), I never thought I'd spend about 5 hours wrestling with Docker while trying to deploy the app to our server, because the Dockerised app would only run on my computer.