Free tier is a baiting strategy. Period.

Oh does it? I didn’t realize that. I’ve just switched over to rsync completely.

scp is deprecated.

Not in a VM is better usage - but “metal” refers to the hardware. Traditionally it’s used for embedded devices - no OS. But containers run on the hardware / OS in exactly the same way that non-containerized processes do. They even share the kernel of the same OS. There is no way non-containerized processes run on “metal” any more than containers do.

Inter-container communication is different. At least with docker which I have more experience with, but they’re similar. Try using the name of your container in your proxy config rather than the external host name.

Are these running on the same server? You haven’t given a lot of information here. Communication between containers is different:

https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/building_running_and_managing_containers/assembly_communicating-among-containers_building-running-and-managing-containers#proc_communicating-between-a-container-and-an-application_assembly_communicating-among-containers

“bare metal” does not mean “outside of a container”. Just say “outside of a container”.

It’s a losing battle, but I’ll fight it anyway.

If you’re just pulling “latest” then docker will fetch the latest when it starts. You can pin to a version tag if you want to keep it stable.

Yeah, you can’t. There is no guarantee that clients will use dns servers in any particular order.

Ah - I get that. You have my sympathies.

A personal project like that would be a great way to train/get experience then. But do realize that it becomes a lot more complicated once you have people other than yourself relying on your application. Suddenly up-time becomes very important and up-time is hard. End-users, even friendly ones, get very frustrated when you say “try now please” a lot. They’ll just stop using it.

HIPAA (not hippa) is not even remotely applicable.

Cheap and easy are in opposition here. Which matters more? There are symptom and medication apps already that would be easy and available right now. And you don’t need to do tech support for family.