6mo ago

Hey it's free, so I'm not complaining

70 comments

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.
  
  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.
  
  ... Interesting. Never heard of these. How do you get it? How much storage does it have?
- 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.

Kinda similar to my self-hosted server; 24 core, 32GB - peak number of concurrent users ever hosted is 3.
- 32 GBs for 3 users? it definitely runs a javascript app
  
  Can't be more than a hello world
  
  I doubt it’s ever peaked at more than 3 GB usage, even with 18 containers running.
  If it ran an Electron app it would need an upgrade.
- 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.

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.
- 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.
  
  Unless GH has another database oopsie.
  
  I wasn't aware of the Github pages being free that's neat. It is fully static (running on nginx but generated with hugo) and I use freedns.afraid.org for the domains. Good to know thanks for the tip :)
  
  And if you want a private repo, you can also use gitlab and point to custom domain with gitlab pages or cloudflare pages.
- Should check out Racknerd. I've got a 4 core, 4 gb ram, 50 gb disk VPS for $50/yr.
  
  Thanks for the tip I'll definitely take a look! That's not bad at all and I prefer yearly payments.
  
  Been using racknerd to host my tiny stupid websites for a couple years, it's great value for money and a fantastic way to learn sysadmin stuff. I also appreciate that they give a lot of heads up for auto-renewal and don't escalate pricing on renewal.
  
  Could you link the page which shows your exact config at that price? I can't find anything like that. KVM, AMD, Windows VPS - I looked at all three but none suggest the price you've written.
  That price sounds like a steal, and I'd love to get it if possible. I currently pay $6/month per VPS with Digital Ocean
  https://www.racknerd.com/ryzen-vps
- 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.
  
  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!

You also get a free static website through SDF without sending anyone info. Just sayin'.
- These guys?
  
  Guide (SDF Wiki)
  Register (sdf.org)
  
  They also host a lemmy instance @ https://lemmy.sdf.org/
  
  Oh this is awesome, how have I never heard of this?
  
  Yep.
  
  SDF in Japan ⇒ Japan SDF ⇒ JSDF ⇒ Japan Self-Defence Forces 🤪

Give use the URL and that 100-number might go 🚀 For testing purposes, naturally.

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!

You can also host it serverless. I set mine up on S3. You pay for egress
- „Serverless“
  looks inside
  Server
  
  Lol well yes it may be a bit of a misnomer. At the very least it is less server than OP was using for their static site
- "Serverless" is using someone else's computer.
  
  So is a "cloud server".
- For a static site Cloudflare Pages is good for free hosting, doing a git commit and watching the site change in a matter of seconds is very satisfying.
- You could also host a website like that on Cloudflare pages for free. That way you even get ddos protection and some other stuff.

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.

70 comments