I Deployed My DevOps Project for FREE — Here's Exactly How (+ $200 Credit for You)

As a student, paying for cloud servers was slowly killing me. 💸 Every tutorial said "just spin up an EC2 instance" or "deploy to GKE." Cool. And then what — watch my AWS bill quietly climb to $40 a month just to run a tiny FastAPI app and a couple of Docker containers? No thanks. I'm a B.Tech student actively building out my DevOps portfolio — Kubernetes clusters, CI/CD pipelines, containerized apps, the works. But here's the dirty secret nobody tells you: all of that practice costs money unless you're smart about it. After bouncing between AWS Free Tier (confusing), GCP trials (expired too fast), and random VPS providers, I finally found something that actually worked for a broke student trying to build real projects: DigitalOcean . Here's the full story of how I deployed my project for free, and exactly how you can do the same. 🧩 What I Actually Needed I wasn't just looking for a place to run Hello World . I needed a real environment where I could practice: Kubernetes — Deploying app