48
votes
Cloud Servers for the Broke
Just wanted to put this out there as a little PSA in case it's helpful: if you want a cloud server but don't wanna pay anything, Oracle's Free Tier is a life saver. Discovered it a year ago and couldn't be happier I did, since I'd never pay for cloud computing otherwise š.
Quick Specs:
For free you get:
- 24/7 uptime
- 200gb of storage space
- 24GB of RAM
- 4 OCPUs
- 4 Gbps Bandwidth
That's been more than enough for me and honestly feels too good to be true. Some things I've done with this:
- Minecraft Server
- Radarr/Sonarr Plex Setup
- I'd like to make my own backup solution as well!
If anyone has any other ideas for cool projects I could self host, please do tell I'm curious what else I could do :)
You're right, it does sound too good to be true.
Considering it's Oracle, I'm inclined to believe it is, so I'm gonna have to look it over carefully.
Thanks for this.
You have to provide credit card details. That's the catch.
So assuming the worst, since it is Oracle, this is great now and in a year or two they'll cripple the service and automatically transfer people over into a paid option, preying on those not paying attention to what they're being billed for.
After using this for a few years, my initial concerns about being charged are over blown.
I have a coworker who has used the always free tier to run his website since forever.
I've run a minecraft server for a couple of years now. My server was inactivated by either me or Oracle. I can't remember. But the 200GB of files remains.
The credit card is just used to validate identity.
You can lose your server if it is idle.
The credit card I used to sign up is not associated with my always free account from a billing perspective.
I would have to re-enter credit card details to upgrade to a paid account.
I can not select any paid services without first upgrading to a paid account.
There was a period where I had free credits where I could acquire paid for services, but frankly I was too nervous to do so.
Logically, it would be brain dead for Oracle to start charging for Always Free. It's not going to add anything significant to the billions of revenue, and it will create immediate bad press. I think the entire purpose of Always Free is to try to create good press in the dev crowd. At this point, my main concern is they decide to kill the program and turn my servers off.
I mean, they require an active, working, credit card on file. Given what they did with the JDK, I have 0 faith that Oracle won't pull something shady. Speaking as a seasoned Oracle DBA.
That said, I'm still contemplating it for some of my home services and game servers.
Use a card number from https://privacy.com so they can't charge you more than you'd like.
Open-sourcing the whole thing, making it the reference implementation and managing to keep almost the whole previous team from Sun which is exceedingly rare in case of takeovers? There are plenty bad to be said about Oracle, but they have been excellent stewards of the Java platform.
Your memory is somewhat different from mine. There were some proprietary bits in the Sun JDK that didn't exist in OpenJDK (which has been a thing since 2006), but they were both always free. In 2018, they changed that.
They took the Sun JDK (now Oracle JDK), and started trying to extract an annual rent of $30 per workstation and $300 per processor on servers. This was the most popular JDK used in commercial applications, as there was virtually no reason to choose OpenJDK over the Sun version. For my employer, this change would have cost us an additional $2 million alone.
The response of the industry as a whole, was not to start paying Oracle billions, but to mass convert to OpenJDK, with Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft putting forth their own prebuilt copies for everyone to use. Anybody with more than 3 brain cells didn't use Oracle OpenJDK for fear of doing this again, because migrations are expensive.
They ended up reversing course in September 2021 because of the mass migration. Of course, anybody with 3 brain cells will not trust Oracle to keep the Oracle JDK free and will continue to use OpenJDK provided by anybody else.
Oracle JDK has been paid since forever, if anything, they have made that freemium (recently).
And Oracle, as mentioned, continuously made OpenJDK and Oracle JDK equivalent, basing the latter on the former. They are responsible for employing almost every contributor (95+% of commits).
You have been paying for support, not for the JDK, as that has been technically equivalent. Itās the same model as Red Hat and Fedora ā is Red Hat evil and charges for Fedora/Linux? No, it is free, they charge you for support at Christmas Eve, 4:00 AM to call them.
No. You used to be able to download and attain Oracle JDK, up until 2018, with the latest security patches, for free. Yes, you could pay for support and additional features, but in 2018 they made that major change: You had to pay to use the binaries even if your vendor software insisted you use them. There was a case where if a vendor was selling to consumers, the vendor would need to pay for the consumer's license.
There's a reason Minecraft switched from Oracle Java in 1.16, to OpenJDK in 1.17, when they changed from version 8 to 16. It's because Microsoft would have needed to pay for all their Minecraft developers using the JDK, and for every Minecraft server they hosted that used it. And possibly a fee for their educational users.
Not sure about the dates, but nowadays the only thing that is paid is using older JDKs, as that is effectively support, having to backport from the active development line.
You are free to use OracleJDK on the latest LTS version, until the next one comes along (with an additional 1 year).
Is he running an actual website?
I came across the Oracle Free Tiger a couple months ago when I was looking around for a place to host a couple flask sites. I didnāt see a way to host completely free. Everything I saw said Iād have to pay for part of it. I think it was the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
My website isnāt publicly available, but it could be if I wanted it to. And it is completely free.
Yeah, you just need to install everything from scratch, web server and all, and be security smart. It requires a solid knowledge of unix.
That figures.
As long as they accept an empty prepaid visa it should be fine lol.
I definitely have more than a few things I've wanted to do with a free server.
They do not.
Hmm well I guess privacy.com probably won't work either.
I mean this won't stop me from trying both but yeah it shows how predatory this is actually meant to be lol.
Even PIN protected cards aren't allowed.
Even in that worst scenario IAAS should help you. As long as you don't use any Oracle specific features (PAAS/SAAS) and stick to a plain Linux/LAMP stack, you can seamlessly migrate your app to another provider (free or otherwise) without disruption.
Note here the danger of getting tied up to a service specific feature. When Heroku pulled the plug few months ago and went all paid, it wasn't so easy for folks to migrate because the hosting was so integrated to your app deployment that it became a PAAS, not IAAS.
Most platforms will try to lock you into their work flow or processes but it's your job as a smart developer to avoid using such platform specific features!
Wonder if you can sign up with a privacy.com burner card with a $1 limit.
Oracle is very picky about registrations, blocking without rights to appeal and deletes free servers with no notice.
A workaround seems to be to move to the lowest paid tier but never use it. I wouldn't know since I was immediately blocked from registering.
Mm for sure, Oracle has definitely been sketchy š thankfully been pretty good for me so far with nothing too important but definitely getting the job done
Make sure you keep the data backed up!
When I switched from my previous VPS who was causing me issues, I briefly considered this. But I've had enough shitty experiences with Oracle professionally that I decided to go somewhere else. For me, I was able to fulfill my requirements using Google App Engine within the free tier. But I do see how this would be attractive for services that you might not care much about, or if you haven't yet had the displeasure of working with this company.
Oracle has been known to just delete servers on their free tier without warning, so keeping proper backups is more important than other cloud services. If you have something you are dependent on running there, then you should probably find a more reliable host.
how did you get the good stuff? When I signed up ages ago I could only get a little one with 1gb ram.
But I will say, for uptime, its been really steady. I'm only running ZNC on it now to test it out... but the testing has been going for just under 200 days without issues.
Try this link! If it doesn't work let me know I'll try my best to help :)
I'm giving it another swing. I can never get the full one. It's a pretty generous offering on their part.
hey, thanks again for this! I had to jump through a lot of hoops to switch regions. I am convinced that this division is full of absolute morons... but in the end it all came together.
Is the offer region restricted?
i donāt think so. the main thing, when you sign up, pick the actual region you want if youāre going to use it as a VPN. That got me fucked up, so i had to move to a pay account, request more regions, wait wait wait, get a phone call from them, and then finally run a new one in the new region.
total pain in the ass. itās great, though. 200gb storage, 4x24gb ram ā excellent performance and reliability. i ran one before this one for ages with znc to give it a proper run without any issues.
so thatās that. do it up. it needs a credit card, but if you follow the guide above, thereās no charge.
I'm seeing only 1 GB of ram in the free tier.
I have been trying to use Oracle's free tier for testing my NixOS configuration multiple times. I tried both, the aarch64 machines and the x86_64 ones, both seem to lock up completely once I put too much load on them. I am not sure yet why these machines do it, but every time I try to run backups using
resticthey just stop answering and I have to hard-reset them in Oracle's web interface.Considering they can turn off my server if it's idling too much, backups are more important than ever.
It is a very good deal though and definitely a cheap way to try out a new OS or tool you fancy.
Their definition of "idle" is a bit odd, too. I had a little IPFS-backed app that I was experimenting with (JWS-signed assertions in IPFS, with public keys bound to plain old non-IPFS URLs. I was trying to be clever.)
The service hummed along with moderate traffic, but got tagged as "idle" anyway. I just moved the whole thing on-prem for development.
Was it running out of ram? The default images donāt have any swap setup, and do pretty poorly when you hit the ram limit. If you add a swap file, it should fix it.
That actually might be it! I won't be near any computer for the next three weeks but I'll definitely try that once I can.
Thank you!
Edit: This fixed all of my issues. Thank you so much!
There is no bandwidth limit?