• bonn2@lemm.ee
    76·
    4 months ago

    Where did you find a free server that is that good? Or is it just one of those 100$ free credit things?

    • myersguy@lemmy.simpl.website
      86·
      4 months ago

      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.

      • LostXOR@fedia.ioOP
        41·
        4 months ago

        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.

        • Dima@lemmy.one
          30·
          4 months ago

          Make sure you have backups, they randomly shut mine down after a couple of years

          • LostXOR@fedia.ioOP
            7·
            4 months ago

            Yep, it’s all backed up locally. I figure eventually they’ll shut it down as they’re losing a fair bit of money.

            • Dima@lemmy.one
              151·
              4 months ago

              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.

              • willya@lemmyf.ukEnglish
                14·
                4 months ago

                Would be helpful to let everyone know the TOS you violated.

                • Dima@lemmy.one
                  9·
                  4 months ago

                  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.

      • starshipwinepineapple@programming.dev
        17·
        4 months ago

        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.

        • LostXOR@fedia.ioOP
          6·
          4 months ago

          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.

        • LostXOR@fedia.ioOP
          161·
          4 months ago

          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.

    • db2@lemmy.world
      81·
      4 months ago

      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.

      • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubEnglish
        9·
        4 months ago

        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.

  • sunbeam60@lemmy.one
    40·
    4 months ago

    Kinda similar to my self-hosted server; 24 core, 32GB - peak number of concurrent users ever hosted is 3.

    • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      3·
      4 months ago

      I have a GSA flashed with non-google firmware that has eight cores and 156GB RAM… it’s not set up yet, but I’ve got all my drives I need. It’s going to be a like 7TB local UNRAID server someday.

  • h0bbl3s@lemmy.world
    24·
    4 months ago

    That’s not bad at all gonna have to check it out. I host my site on digital ocean it’s on the smallest single core 1gb ram droplet. I run crowdsec and nginx and a couple other little things and it sits around 40% ram usage. Costs 6$ a month and I added 4 weeks worth of automatic weekly backups for $1.50 a month.

    I can deal with $7.50 for a little static web server.

    They do offer a free $200/60 day credit if you get in with one of the free Linux Foundation cloud classes which is plenty to play with.

    • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      38·
      4 months ago

      FWIW, if all you have is a truly static website (html, css, and js), then GitHub Pages is free and you can point a custom domain there from your registrar, and don’t have to worry about backups or server uptime.

    • frezik@midwest.social
      4·
      4 months ago

      I do the smallest Amazon Lightsail instance for a static site of about $1.50/month. Site is statically generated from templates in a private git repo I host and backup at home, so I don’t worry about the site itself needing a backup.

      I was going to host a Bitwarden instance, as well, but with its RAM requirements, it was cheaper to pay a Bitwarden subscription. So it ended up being just a static site, plus Route 53.

      One thing is that it’s pretty clear Amazon doesn’t like Lightsail. They do it because it competes with some other small fixed price hosting options from other companies. To let me use it, I had to email AWS customer support and answer a bunch of questions about what I wanted to do with it and if I had considered EC2, instead.

      • h0bbl3s@lemmy.world
        1·
        4 months ago

        My site is also statically generated from templates I keep in a private git repo hosted on github I keep local backups of, but I do the generating directly on the server. I just pull the site and generate it manually whenever I do an update. I like the sound of your setup better thanks for the pointers!

  • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
    10·
    4 months ago

    Yeah I’m pretty popular. At this rate I should just add a /wp-admin webpage - according to my logs it’s in very high demand!

  • lengau@midwest.social
    5·
    4 months ago

    This is the opposite of the time my friend posted a link to my personal site on Digg. It was running on a Pentium 1 with 128 MiB of RAM on a home internet connection.