this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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Where did you find a free server that is that good? Or is it just one of those 100$ free credit things?
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.
Yep, it's Oracle. It's a really great deal; I've been using their services for a couple years now and haven't had any problems.
Make sure you have backups, they randomly shut mine down after a couple of years
Yep, it's all backed up locally. I figure eventually they'll shut it down as they're losing a fair bit of money.
sure it wasn't related to the server center that caught on fire due to an UPS update?
They disabled my account without any notice, I tried to login to see why my VM wasn't responding and found they'd deactivated Oracle cloud services. It's also difficult to get in touch with support as there's multiple different portals and with the cloud services disabled I struggled to find a way to raise a relevant ticket. When they eventually responded they gave some generic BS about their ToS.
My suggestion for anyone using Oracle free tier is stay on it if you want, but be prepared for the eventuality that they shut everything down without notice or access to your data.
Would be helpful to let everyone know the TOS you violated.
No idea, didn't do anything wrong and they were fine with it all until they suddenly closed my account. I too would like to know what I did wrong.
Yes, oracle will reclaim your server if it falls under certain thresholds for the resources you've signed up for. So it might be better to request less resources then you need but this will somewhat complicate things if you want more resources in the future since iirc you can't simply resize.
One way to get around all of this though is convert to pay as you go (PAYG). PAYG gets the same always free allocations and you only pay for use above that, and oracle won't reclaim PAYG (at least not my server for ~4 years). Just set up a budget of a $1 and then alerts to email you if you reach 1% of your budget. If you somehow go over your free resources it'll tell you.
Lastly in some cases oracle just straight up loses your data or disables your account. As always practice 3-2-1 backups (don't rely on the free rotating backups on their servers as your only backup).
It's some hoops to jump through but i was paying $5/ month for a digital ocean droplet and the oracle server has been running for 4 years now, and i also have scaled up one project and started a few others that wouldn't have all fit on my droplet. Other than the threat of reclaiming my resources before i switched to PAYG I've been pretty happy with it.
Yeah I switched to PAYG to lessen the chance of that happening. So far I've managed to not accidentally spend $5000 in some dumb way, so it's basically equivalent to the free tier.
... Interesting. Never heard of these. How do you get it? How much storage does it have?
You can sign up here, and it comes with 200GB of storage and 10TB of monthly bandwidth. And apparently a $300 credit, ~~that wasn't around when I signed up.~~
Edit: Nevermind, must've not noticed it.
It's oracle. You can get up to 4 cores and 24gb ram on an arm vm from Oracle cloud for free when there are open slots. They get snapped up quick.
are you sure there isn't small print somewhere saying you forfeit your eternal soul to larry ellison?
🤫
They probably get you in bandwidth fees over X amount. It would cost pennies for a small scale virtual server with big numbers as the hardware is shared, it would spend most of the time not doing anything. They could set up a machine and oversell a tier like that and make it all back with profit on their first bill.
I bet they run these free accounts on their test infrastructure, not production. What they get from it is real-world user testing of changes to their infrastructure, similar to how Microsoft uses its Windows Home versions for testing new updates.