I’m looking to host my own website and mess around with some services but my current home server is already pushed to the max. Planning on getting some thin clients for proxmox when I have some more money, but for now I wanted to mess around on Oracles free tier to test some stuff. I heard they will randomly delete accounts / free cloud vps and was wondering if there was a way to mitigate this. Some post I’ve seen seems to be tied to not having a CC on file with them so after 30 days or so when it “charges” your account and there is no payment option, the vps will get deleted. Does anyone have experience dealing with this? I wouldn’t mind adding a card to the account as long as I won’t wake up to a huge bill one day because I went over the limit.
IMO get a <$25/year VPS rather than dealing with Oracle’s free tier. Look at sale pricing from RackNerd, GreenCloudVPS, HostHatch, etc.
I’ve bought a few of their yearly vps and they aren’t bad. Don’t seem to be oversubscribed on CPU and memory at least. Not sure on network and disk, but I haven’t noticed any issues so far.
Granted it’s very much in the realm of expecting to get what you pay for. I doubt they’re lenient towards people abusing super cheap vms.
If you stick with the known good providers, things usually work out well.
I’m running my Lemmy and Mastodon servers on a VPS I got from GreenCloudVPS during their 9th birthday celebration: 9 cores (old Intel Xeon E5 though), 9GB RAM, 99GB NVMe SSD for $99 every three years (effectively $2.75/month). I haven’t had any issues with it, and it’s located very close to me so the ping time is <10ms.
I’m running my email server on a similar VPS but with fewer cores on a much newer AMD EPYC processors.
Any companies that have been around 5+ years are usually fine. Hosthatch is the main host I use and I think they’ve been around 10 or 11 years now. They sporadically have very good sales on Lowendtalk.com
The documentation clearly states that idle vms on free tier could be reclaimed: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm#freetier_topic_Always_Free_Resources_Infrastructure
Idle Always Free compute instances may be reclaimed by Oracle. Oracle will deem virtual machine and bare metal compute instances as idle if, during a 7-day period, the following are true: CPU utilization for the 95th percentile is less than 15% Network utilization is less than 15% Memory utilization is less than 15% (applies to A1 shapes only)
So don’t create a 4 core 32gb ram vm to run a vpn, and you should be fine :)
A lot of the issues people have with Oracle is caused by using not using a normal credit card or not keeping a valid card on file. A bunch of failed signup attempts will probably get your account flagged. When you sign up for free tier, you will be charged a couple of times, but it will be returned within a few days. You can’t do anything on free tier that will cost you money. You would have to upgrade to pay as you go, which requires re entering your credit card info, if you want to use anything that’s not free.
Don’t run any public proxies or VPNs. Your account will be gone as soon as they get a DCMA notice. If they get complaints about anything you are hosting, they will likely terminate your account as well. Don’t do anything even remotely related to crypto currency. Don’t do a bunch of port scans or ping a large nunber of IPs. Don’t stop or remove the Oracle services that come with their images either.
If your instances don’t have enough load on them, they will be stopped after about a week. You can always restart them, but that can be difficult with the ARM instances since they are in high demand.
I just ran stress -c 1 on mine to keep the CPU usage above the idle threshold until I did enough stuff on it where that wasn’t necessary anymore
I have heard that they do this but in about 2 years of having mine and doing nothing out of the ordinary they have left it alone. There was even a decent chunk of time where it was just sitting there idle. I have heard people say that having a credit card on file helps but I have never had any form of payment on file nor ever purchased anything from them.
These days I just have uptime kuma on it.
I’ve had mine since Nov 2020, no issues with deletion. I think the trick is to have a CC on file or be charged at least one. I know I generated a few storage charges, ended up paying less than $2 but I think that has classified me as a ‘paying customer’. However I would recommend always being prepared for eventual deletion. Make backups, record your process for setting things up so you can switch to a different provider should the worst happen.
